Hisense U8N Review

The Hisense U8N aims squarely at the top-end mini LED television market, positioning itself directly against the Samsung QN90D and the LG QNED 90T while coming in significantly cheaper. Spec for spec, the U8N trades blows evenly with both, and if you’re willing to deal with the occasional operating system bug, you’ll find a lot to like.

For the last several years, I’ve been a fan of the performance and price of Hisense televisions, but I’ve never overly praised them for their design. They’ve been fine, but they didn’t “wow” me. It wasn’t a pain point, but someone at Hisense decided to really put some effort into the frame of the 2024 line, and the new U8N sports a look that significantly changes the discussion – it looks great.

Firstly, Hisense chose a new center-mounted stand instead of the dual foot option that it has used in the past in televisions like the U8K from last year. These types of stands make it a lot easier to hide cables without sacrificing any adjustability. The U8N stand has two heights to choose from and all cables can be routed back behind the stand and out of sight regardless of which you choose. You can also, of course, wall mount it.

But more than the stand, Hisense went with a much nicer and thinner lower bezel on the U8N that eschews the giant “Hisense” logo plastered on a plastic “chin,” replacing it with a barely noticeable little bump. There are no physical controls on the U8N outside of a small switch below the center of the base that turns the microphone on and off.

On that note, I’ve annually complained about this microphone situation with Hisense TVs because if you turn that microphone off, bright orange LEDs turn on – and they can’t be turned off. That was the case in previous models, and while there is still a bright LED that will illuminate if you tell the TV not to listen to you, there is only one instead of three and it’s much smaller and easier to ignore than in the past. I still don’t like it, I’m still going to call attention to it, but it is the least offensive implementation of this system that Hisense has ever pushed out, so that’s worth something.

On the rear of the U8N you will find a power port on the right side while the majority of the ports live on the left side. There are 4 HDMI ports, two of which support 4K at up to 144Hz (HDMI 2.1) while the other two support 4K at up to 60Hz (HDMI 2.0). Thankfully, the eARC port is one of the latter, so you don’t have to take up one of the high-performance ports with your sound system and can instead plug in a PC and a gaming console at the same time. On that note, you do need to go into the settings and enable “enhanced” performance on these ports.

The U8N features a LAN connection, an optical audio port, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB-A 2.0 port and a USB-A 3.0 port, WiFi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and ATSC 3.0.

From the front, the U8N looks great, and while it doesn’t have a particularly thin chassis from a depth perspective, it isn’t an obtrusive design. Overall, it is a greatly improved look versus past Hisense models and the design is on par with its direct LG and Samsung competitors.

For some reason, Hisense chose a much larger remote size instead of slimming down. It has a lot of empty space and is thus unnecessarily huge. Sony used to have remotes this big because it crammed about four times as many buttons than it really needed. Meanwhile Samsung has been on the polar opposite of this trend with a remote that is so small it arguably does not have enough buttons.

The previous Hisense remotes were what I considered to be in a perfect sweet spot. Not so small that you have to put multiple functions into one button but not so large that it dominates a coffee table. Sadly, the U8N remote undoes a lot of that and is much too big, especially since it doesn’t add any more buttons than the previous design.

My review sample included five predetermined shortcut buttons – Netflix, YouTube, Prime Video, Disney+, and Tubi – as well as one customizable button. I don’t usually mind these built-in shortcuts but getting a customizable one is unusual, so it’s nice to see it here.

Otherwise, the remote features the same buttons that its predecessor did, except now there is a big blank spot at the bottom which, I guess, is for holding.

One final note: either the included AAA batteries for the remote were truly atrocious or this remote is a serious power hog. I started getting a low battery warning within a few weeks of use, so you’re going to want to have some spares handy.

Hisense uses Google TV as its operating system and it’s one of my favorites available right now, mostly because you can set it to “Apps Only Mode” to significantly reduce the amount of advertising you get. When active, it will only show the rotating banner at the top of the home screen and then all your installed apps, instead of bombarding you with suggestions on what to watch.

Google TV also doesn’t autoplay anything from the home screen, meaning you have a relatively unintrusive experience.

Leveraging Google TV means that there are a good number of customization options when it comes to picture quality. That, and Hisense licenses Dolby Vision and IMAX Enhanced to go along with its Filmmaker Mode, giving you access to all of the most popular HDR profiles including HDR10, HDR10+, HDR10+ Adaptive, and HLG. Basically, if it’s a modern program being broadcast in HDR, the U8N can display it as intended. The Dolby license also includes Dolby Vision Gaming and Hisense packs AMD FreeSync Premium Pro, too.

In order to manage all these settings in gaming, Hisense has a Game Bar that rivals those found in Samsung and LG TVs, which are the best in the industry right now. You can make specific tweaks to settings to fit your desired framerate and picture as well as see the current signal output and a live feed of frames per second.

Hisense powers its interface and viewing experience with its Hi-View Engine Pro, which promises dynamic tone mapping, face detection to adjust skin appearance actively in the frame, AI HDR enhancement, and detail enhancement with noise reduction. We’ll get into how this performs in actual use below.

I found the software to be typically pretty snappy and responsive, although sometimes it hitches up for a bit before an input is recognized. It’s not common, but you can tell it’s sometimes a bit slow.

Additionally, sometimes the television would refuse to recognize an attached eARC device, even after multiple restarts. I would have to unplug and replug the power of my attached sound bar in order for the U8N to recognize that it was connected and able to be used as sound output, even though navigating to the HDMI source of the soundbar showed it was sending a signal.

I also found HDMI control to be a bit overzealous, often sending a “turn off” signal to an attached console when it was still active. This wasn’t an issue on PC, but with the PS5 I had to turn HDMI control off entirely in order to not have any issues during a gaming session. Easy enough, and I don’t like HDMI control anyway, but still worth pointing out.

Hisense doesn’t appear to do anything to the picture that artificially juices colors or highlights, which means if you’re coming from a Samsung display, you’re going to think the contrast looks a little lackluster.

In reality, Hisense is doing a better job showing content as it is intended to be viewed. You can pump up the contrast if you want, but when you tell it to use Filmmaker Mode (which I always recommend) or any of its HDR profiles, you’re seeing the content as it was designed to be watched.

Even though it doesn’t always look like it because it’s not pumping extra power into the highlights, the Hisense U8N can get exceptionally bright. Hisense televisions have been leaders in pure brightness power for years now and that doesn’t change with the U8N, as it can blast up to 3,000 nits peak. This television has the chops to overpower light in even the brightest living room and can be adjusted down to still be pleasant in a dark basement. Once again, Hisense is a top performer when it comes to brightness. Hisense also layered on an anti-reflective surface to the U8N’s panel, further allowing this television to thrive in bright rooms.

There is minimal stutter and judder and on-screen content is crisp, sharp, and balanced.

The U8N covers 99% of sRGB, 85.4% of Adobe RGB, and 96.2% of DCI P3 color gamuts, with an average Delta E of 1.77 in my testing, making it a solid performer when it comes to color accuracy. I used the U8N as a television, console display, and PC display during testing and it worked fantastically for all three purposes. Nitpicking, the panel likes to push reds and blues harder than greens, and if this bothers you, it can be adjusted in the panel’s settings.

A weakness of the U8N is panel uniformity. Not only does the color accuracy of the panel dip in all four corners, but my review sample has multiple “spots” of dead pixels, straight out of the box. You’re going to want to check for these too when you unbox it, and should you have these same dead pixel issues, get it replaced immediately if possible. The uniformity is less of a major concern, though, since corners aren’t as important when watching TV as the center, where the U8N performs very well.

While it does boast 2,000 dimming zones, the U8N’s weakness – as is the weakness of almost every mini LED with quantum dots – is halo. Bright text, like captions, set against a black background will exhibit a glow around them, which some find very distracting. It’s not something a manufacturer can easily compensate for on LED televisions, meaning you’ll have to fork over the cash for an OLED panel to get perfect, sharp lines. The performance on the U8N is at expected levels, but it’s still something worth noting.

As is often the case with LED panels, off-angle viewing is weaker on the U8N. It’s not abysmal by any stretch, but contrast washes out and colors become less vibrant when viewed from the side, so you’ll want to position yourself as close to straight-on as possible.

On the aforementioned Hi-View Engine Pro: I can’t say I noticed it doing anything, which means it’s probably working really well. It isn’t doing so much that I can point to a scene and say “that was enhanced by AI,” and the content I watched looked natural and pleasant. HDR content, provided there were no singular bright spots that would cause a halo, could often look as good as what I’ve come to expect out of an OLED panel. Darks can look inky black while highlights pop.

The Hisense U8N is an outstanding gaming television for both console and PC users. I tested it with Cyberpunk 2077 on PC (high or ultra settings across the board) as well as with Destiny 2 and Apex Legends on the PS5. In all cases, the panel provided gorgeous visuals with no noticeable latency.

Perhaps the best part of the panel is its balanced approach to shadows and highlights. It can quickly adapt to changing lighting conditions and will accurately display bright areas of a scene as well as the darks, so the panel doesn’t have to try and jump back and forth between them, which can be a very immersion-breaking experience that is common on some other LED panels.

The aforementioned Game Bar works great and lets you adjust your gaming experience to your personal preferences, as well as show you your current resolution and frame rate in real time. The high frame rate makes shooters feel really good, and even Cyberpunk 2077 felt snappy and enjoyable using a controller.

I have no complaints when it comes to the gaming performance of the U8N. As far as LED panels go, it competes with the best of them.

While the Hisense U8N can get loud and has a decent bass response for a flatscreen, it suffers from pretty noticeable distortion even at low volumes. The result is that music, in particular, doesn’t sound great. Sometimes even an irritating “crackle” will be audible when music is too complicated for the speaker system to handle.

Voices are, however, clear and crisp. While I would say that the audio performance of the U8N is “fine,” I don’t think this television is breaking any new territory when it comes to sound and I still highly recommend a dedicated sound system or, at the very least, a sound bar.

Hisense specifically targets the U8N as an alternative to the Samsung QN90D and the LG QNED 90T. Fortuitously, I reviewed the Samsung QN90D right before this and have to say that for the price, the U8N makes a strong case for itself as the better deal. Samsung just charges a lot for its television and while I think that general-purpose users will probably like the boosted saturation and contrast that Samsung likes to give, Hisense gives you a lot more value for your dollar especially considering that not only is it a lot less expensive, it supports far more HDR profiles.