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.

Hisense U8N – Design and Build

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.

Hisense U8N – The Remote

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 U8N – Software and UI

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 U8N – Picture Quality

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.