Hisense – 65″ Class U8 Series Mini-LED 4K UHD QLED Google TV

If you’re reading this chances are that you are aware of the U8 series as one of the best bang for the buck televisions out there and that this year’s model specifically has a much higher peak brightness than last year’s. So I may as well start there: this thing is BRIGHT. I mean, crazy bright. If you crank the brightness setting and open up the built-in web browser it pretty much goes straight to a fully white screen. And I’m telling you… at this level the TV is brighter than the four lights in my room! It’s pretty nuts. Almost overwhelmingly bright. Where you benefit from that the most, of course, is when watching HDR content in any number of apps that support it. My previous television was a decent model with HDR/Dolby Vision support but it’s crazy how much better things are now than five years ago, even. Go fire up one of the movies on Disney+ that is IMAX Enhanced and watch this TV completely come to life. I really have no picture complaints at the highest levels. It just handles all of that wonderfully. I’ve turned off a lot of the motion smoothing options, but other than that I haven’t touched any of the settings when in Dolby Vision or HDR 10+. It really is wonderful right out of the box. I will say, I’ve had a little bit of a time getting some things that are just streaming in 1080p to look great. Some original shows on Netflix, for example. I may just need to do some further tweaking of the settings, or it could just be that this television really highlights things that weren’t great looking to begin with. I’m not sure. I do know that just turning off motion smoothing once doesn’t mean it’s off universally. So you may want to double check those things when bouncing around from app to app. As for Mini-LED vs. OLED, I think it’s a case where if you have either you are going to be very happy. If you can afford OLED, have at it. But it’s truly a great time where there’s an option that’s pretty darn close but frequently a good bit cheaper. I have noticed very little blooming, and mainly only when there’s white text against a black background. Viewing angles could be better (see pics), but it’s perfectly fine for our specific seating arrangement.
But if you skipped all of that and just saw this: the picture looks incredible overall.
Sound. Here’s probably all you need to know: I watched something once for about ten minutes before realizing the sound wasn’t coming through my Samsung Dolby Atmos soundbar system and was instead coming out of the TV speakers. I had no idea! It’s very impressive. If you don’t already have external speakers of some kind, I’d try the TV speakers out and see how important it is to you personally to have something better. You may be able to get by just fine depending on your own tastes.
Remote. I think it might be one of my favorites ever. I love the brushed aluminum look and it feels weighty in the hand even though it’s plastic. There is some automatic backlighting built in that is very appreciated and the buttons have a great rubbery feel that makes navigation super easy. I like the app shortcut buttons and you can even program one of them to an app or action of your choice. Pretty cool! Pro Tip: use the menu button to make quick picture/sound adjustments. It’s easier than going to the settings button, and truthfully a little confusing at first having both. Which brings me to…
Google TV. This is my first experience with this OS and there’s a lot to like. I prefer it to the blandness of Roku, but it’s not as elegant as the AppleTV software. The main page is simple to navigate and signing in with a Google account made a lot of app log ins very easy. Pretty much any app you want is available and I dig the built in “live” TV options. But there are some weird quirks. For starters, there’s a library category up top. That’s great in theory, but if you have a large library of movies or shows that you own then good look scrolling through it because there’s no simple “view all” option. It’s insanity. You’re better off to search for Google Play Movies app or whatever it’s called now, open that up, and scroll through your library that way. And then I ran into this issue where I should be able to use my Google Photos library as a screensaver in “ambient mode.” See the picture I attached. I followed the instructions and opened the Google Home app… only to discover using my Google Photos library isn’t even listed as an option. Will it ever show up? Who knows! In some ways, I think Google is guilty of what so many of these TV software systems are guilty of: trying to do too much. Just make it easy for me to find stuff. Ah, the modern dilemma…
Games. I’m not much of a gamer, but Metroid Prime on the Switch looked incredible. So take that for what it’s worth.
All in all, this is an easy recommendation. The TV excels at what I want a modern TV to do: light up a room and make HDR content blow my socks (and eyes) off. The design itself is stylish and subtle. The back of the tv actually looks cool! It’s heavy and the pedestal seems rock solid. I’m super happy with this set and hope to continually be blown away by it for the next ten years.

Absolutely gorgeous! My 9 year old Vizio started to have some of the backlights go out. I’d gotten my mother a 55UH8 back in 2022 and was super impressed with it so decided to look into the latest models.
Unfortunately, there weren’t many online reviews available. One YouTuber made a bunch of negative reviews about the 55″ one. Various sources indicated the 55 is way different than the 65 and the 75 is way different than the 65. My old unit was a 60, so 65 was really what I was looking at. There was a lot of talk about how fantastic the U7N was as well.
I went to the nearest Best Buy hoping to see some display units of the U7N and U8N to compare side-by-side, but unfortunately that store had -no- HiSense display units at all(not even the previous generation). The blue shirt that came up to my gf and I was less than helpful. Smug and tried to bad mouth the brand. We almost got into a fight over specs.
Last week a review site I trust did their full review(with the 65) and it was a lot of high praise. The night before yet another one of the led’s died on my home set. After looking online for shipping a U8N I checked and found one in stock at a different local Best Buy than the one I visited the week before. I added to my cart and hit “buy” and was shocked that I got a text 10 minutes later letting me know to come by and pick it up.
Assembly instructions were pretty clear. It’s a two person job. One person pretty much is just keeping the tv steady while you mount the stand on the bottom. It’s got two positions, one for as far down as possible, the other to clear a sound bar. Unfortunately, my Vizio M512a-H6 covers the ir port on the tv when it sits on the stand, so I have it off kilter as far forward as I could get it(the stand sticks out pretty far).
Setup was super fast. Everything is very fluid and responsive. I have an XBox Series X, so I needed to adjust a few settings to allow all the options this tv supports.
Only thing I’ve done is switch it into Filmaker Mode for everything. I tried turning off the ambient light sensor and almost got blinded by how bright the tv adjusted to.
All of the games and content I’ve used on it has looked absolutely fantastic. I’ve found myself getting on YouTube and doing a bunch of Dolby Vision/OLED demos just to do a bunch of “oooh” and “awww” from the set.
For a laugh, I unplugged my sound bar to see what the tv speakers were like. I was shocked how booming and rich they sounded. So those without a sound bar are in for a pleasant surprise. Since my old tv didn’t support eARC(only ARC) I had the XBox to the sound bar to the TV to be able to have Dolby Atmos. When the XBox would time out from my gf falling asleep, she’d just wake the XBox back up but the sound bar woudln’t wake up. So I’m used to coming home and scoffing at the hollow tinny sound of the old tv before kicking the sound bar back in. With the U8N, I don’t think I would notice except for the rear speakers/subwoofer not firing.
I’m very-very-very much looking forward to rtings doing their indepth review so I can have some recommended settings to change.

I would say that the Hisense U8N was a great looking TV as long as you were looking directly at it, as soon as you move to an angle view, it would be grainy, so I returned it and purchased a Samsung S90D, which is a gorgeous television.