Hisense U8H review

The Hisense U8H Mini-LED TV is all about putting high-end features in a price range that is more affordable. For example, it has a light sensor for Dolby Vision IQ that can adjust the brightness to match the amount of light in the room and a Mini-LED panel that can be dimmed in up to 528 different spots.

It has more peak brightness than any other TV in that price range, and it shows colors as well as some of this year’s best TVs. Not only does it have some smart-looking specs, the sound system in the back is big and has a lot of bass, but the mid-range could be a bit stronger. What’s the worst news? Even though this is a powerful TV, Hisense’s upscaling and motion processing aren’t as good as LG smart tv, Samsung, or Sony’s.

This means that in some scenes, the motion will not be as smooth and there will be color banding. If you don’t know much about those terms, these problems won’t ruin your experience, but videophiles might notice them, and they can turn a good experience into a bad one.

Hisense U8H review: Design

Even though the Hisense U8H may not have the thinnest profile or the most cutting-edge design, it does a good job of keeping the bezels to a minimum. Along the bottom, there’s a long silver bar with the Hisense logo on it. The rest of the edges, though, are all screen.

The back of the Hisense U8H is not thin like the backs of OLED TVs. You’re looking at about 3 inches of depth from front to back. but if you want to hang it on the wall, it will definitely stick out a bit. The Hisense U8H has standard VESA 400 x 400mm brackets, so it shouldn’t be too hard.

If you’d rather put it on a table, there are also two legs in the box. The good news is that you can put the legs farther apart if you want more stability or closer together if the table you’re putting the TV on isn’t very wide. This gives you some good options for where to put the TV. You can buy this TVs from its official website.

Hisense U8H review: Display

The U8H doesn’t look great from every angle, but it looks good from the front, which is where it matters the most. Most TV makers are reducing how much branding they show and getting rid of extra parts on the bezels, which is a strategy we agree with. However, Hisense chose to do the opposite, which isn’t too bad because it’s just one small box at the bottom of the screen.

By default, this box shows a power icon when the TV is off. This seems backwards, but I think it’s there to show that it’s getting power. You can turn this off in the menu. It also has a physical switch that lets you turn on or off the microphone that is connected to your smart home.

By default, the microphone is on, and when you turn it off, the TV shows four very bright yellow LEDs that don’t go away. Even in the menu, I couldn’t find a way to turn them off, which is pretty annoying. It’s like the TV is punishing you because you don’t want Google to always be listening in.

Hisense U8H review: Performance

Hisense’s TV comes with Google’s main hub interface, which puts all of my favorite streaming apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Prime Video on the home screen along with promoted shows and movies. After we had watched some shows and movies on different platforms, the home hub took my shows from the apps and put them on the home page so I could watch them again later.

Not all of my shows were shown, though; it took me a while to figure out why. My home’s Netflix profiles got mixed up because of the interface, so the U8H TV decided not to show all the shows that my family was watching on different profiles. In the big picture of a smart TV, it’s not a big deal, but it is still annoying.

Hisense U8H review: Sound Quality

The U8H has two 10-watt speakers built in, and a “subwoofer” is also built in and mounted on the back of the set. There is support for Dolby Atmos, and it can also be turned off in the audio setup menu. You can boost or cut the sub output and make the rest of the audio range sound the same with other menu settings.

Even though the U8H had both Dolby Atmos and a built-in sub, the sound quality wasn’t great. I didn’t notice any Atmos height effects, and even when the volume was turned up loud, the sound didn’t have any dynamics. The effect of that sub was also pretty small, and the TV didn’t have much in the way of bass.

Hisense U8H review: Price

The U8H is in direct competition with TVs like the Samsung tv QN90B, which costs $2,600, and the TCL 6-Series, which costs less than $1,000. The end result is a TV that seems to be priced just right. It does better than the TCL enough to be worth the extra money, but we don’t know why Samsung thinks it can charge that much for a TV whose picture quality is only a little bit better.

Hisense U8H review: Final words

The Hisense U8H came out in 2022 and is a mid-range 4k TV. It’s the second-most expensive 2022 ULED model from Hisense, after the Hisense U7H and before the Hisense U9H. It comes in three sizes, ranging from 55″ to 75″, and all of them work pretty much the same.

It takes the place of the Hisense U8G and is very similar, but it has a new Mini LED backlight with up to 528 dimming zones and a slightly different look. It comes with the easy-to-use Google TV 11 interface, which is an updated version of the Android TV interface that can be found on Hisense TVs from 2021.

It has a lot of great gaming features, like HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on two of its HDMI ports and support for FreeSync, which lets you change the refresh rate. This TV is called the U88H in Canada but does the same thing. Different versions used in different countries have the same or similar names but work differently.