Hisense has the unusual, yet commendable, tradition of delivering televisions that compete technologically well above their price points, and its 2025 U8 series is no exception. The U8QG replaces last year’s U8N, offering more local dimming zones, up to 4000 nits of peak brightness, steps up the native refresh rate from 144 to 165 Hz, and even offers a 288 Hz mode at QHD. It's not perfect: weak viewing angles and sluggish response times might steer gamers towards an OLED alternative like Samsung's S90F or LG’s G4, but for the price, the U8QG offers an incredibly impressive, perhaps unbeatable, HDR experience.
Key Specs at a Glance:
- Smart OS: Google TV
- Panel type: VA Quantum Dot, FALD Backlit
- Refresh Rate: 165 Hz native (288 Hz QHD mode)
- HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10+
- Peak Brightness: ~4060 nits
- Dimming Zones: 2048 (32*64)
- Average Response Time: 20 ms
Hisense U8QG – Setup and First Impressions:
Hisense sent the 65” variant of the U8QG for review, and unboxing and setup were surprisingly easy processes. Six screws and the stand was on and ready. The TV is pretty heavy, though, and muscling it up onto a table by myself without putting a single fingerprint on the AR coating was a bit of an adventure. Two people are recommended!
While the TV’s main chassis is plastic, the build quality seems very good. The thickness of the unit, around 1.75”, may seem a bit chunky by today’s thinness-crazed OLED sensibilities, but the stiffness it imparts made me feel at ease that it wouldn’t buckle or bend or crack as I clumsily hoisted it onto my table. No doubt this thickness holds the 32x64 backlight array and whatever cooling Hisense found necessary to hit the absurd brightness values I’ll talk about soon.
The back of the TV is home to the usual grouping of inputs (ethernet, antenna, mini RCA, headphone. etc.), but importantly, all three HDMI inputs are version 2.1 and support the full 165 Hz refresh rate at 4K. One minor niggle is that the IO and power input are on different sides of the display. This, coupled with a just-slightly-too-short power cable, caused me a bit of a headache trying to get my PC and the TV connected to the same outlet without awkwardly draping an HDMI cable behind my display table. No HDMI cables are included, so do make sure you’ve got an HDMI cable long enough for your setup.
The U8QG uses Google TV as its smart operating system, and for someone very much not Gen Z (I’d rather plug my VCR directly into Input 1, thanks), setup was trivially easy: a QR code allowed me to use my phone to directly connect my Google account. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc. are all easily available, and if you don’t want to fuss around too much with a “smart” product, like me, Google TV’s minimalistic approach is quite decent.
I do want to make special note of Hisense’s TV menu and navigation. My first impressions were good, and those have been backed up and reinforced by weeks of use as I’ve been testing. Navigation with the remote is snappy and responsive, settings that you may frequently want to adjust are laid out logically and, importantly, are easy to get to. For instance, I can open the menu, change the local dimming type and brightness, and be back to watching/gaming in around three clicks and less than three seconds. As someone who spends a lot of time in the TV menus, Hisense has done a great job here.
Reflection Handling
Hisense has also done a fantastic job with the U8QG in controlling reflections and keeping blacks very black even in bright viewing conditions. The screen is a true glossy screen, and any reflections take on a purple-ish tint and are substantially attenuated. Very bright spot reflections will cause a rainbow diffraction grating effect from Hisense’s surface treatment, but this is generally not an issue.
The excellent anti-reflective coating coupled with the U8QG’s ability to maintain a staggering 780 nits continuously work together to make for a great daytime viewing/gaming experience.
Sound
Audio quality is decent. The built-in speakers have good extension into low frequencies, falling off below about 55 Hz, and the frequency response is linear through the important mid-range. But because the audio is projected up and back, voices and treble sound diffuse and dialogue is a little hard to understand at lower volumes. At moderate volumes, distortion is very high.
The U8 series is soundly in the realm of high-end televisions, so buyers likely won’t be satisfied with the TV speakers. To deliver the volume, punch, and clarity that the U8QG deserves to have paired with its image quality, you’ll want an external audio solution. In audio, there’s no replacement for displacement.
Calibration
Hisense offers a usual selection of picture modes (Vivid, Standard, Sports, Energy Saving, etc.), but most of these should be avoided; sticking with PC/Game, one of the Theater modes (Day/Night), or FILMMAKER MODE gives the best out-of-the-box picture without unnecessary “features” like sharpening or noise reduction or motion smoothing.
20-point white balance and gamma calibration are offered, which is great for those true color nerds who have the time and equipment necessary to wring the last little bit of performance from their sets, but my preference is always to have manufacturers do the work themselves.
Hisense did the work.
With just a small tweak to the 2-point white balance calibration (I used -1 for R and G gain, no other modifications), the U8QG has near-perfect 6500K white balance tracking, and the gamma conforms nicely to BT.1886.
For a display at this price point, buyers shouldn’t need to monkey around with picture settings or correct major deficiencies in white balance or gamma, and Hisense has delivered: the U8QG is a remarkable performer.
Color
The U8QG has exceptionally vivid colors, and taking a look at its backlight spectrum gives us a peak at how that was done. Hisense uses quantum dots in their U series, which produce smooth and distinct RGB primaries. The red (peaking at 629 nm) and blue (at 447 nm) are doing the lion’s share of work to push the gamut well beyond the P3 color space.
We’ll get into brightness soon, but getting the U8QG’s dose of color saturation at eyeball-searing levels of brightness is intoxicating, and this is especially true if you’re coming from gaming monitors that struggle to hit 300 nits. Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City at night is something to behold.
Keeping the panel in its “Native” gamut mode does lead to some slight oversaturation in skin tones (and the before-mentioned oversaturation of pure red and pure blue), but with delta E’s usually below 3, most won’t find it objectionable. I certainly don’t, and my recommendation is to keep the TV in Native. Hisense does offer gamut clamps for BT.709 (sRGB) and DCI-P3 if you’re viewing content mastered for those color spaces and want the most accurate image possible.
SDR & HDR
One of the highlight features of the U8QG is its incredibly bright full array backlight, and it’s also why, putting cost aside for the moment, you might opt for a VA panel over OLED.
The 65” U8QG is bright. Shockingly bright. Loading up Doom: The Dark Ages for the first time, the id Tech logo was so bright it made me wince, squinting my eyes, reflexively bringing my hands up to shield my face… but not in a bad way. There’s something strangely thrilling about a display that gets uncomfortably bright, and it’s especially surreal for something like the id Tech logo where the remaining backlight zones are completely off, so there’s this floating, explosively bright logo surrounded by pitch black.
I was a little disappointed, though, that this nit overkill wasn’t really present in games or movies – that is, “real content” – whether in SDR or HDR (the Hisense has similar brightness behavior in both modes). My measurements bear this out: on pure black/white measurement slides, something more akin to that id Tech logo that blew me away, the Hisense hits 3,360 nits on a 2% window! At a 10% window size, it’ll do more than 4000! This gradually tapers off towards 780 nits as the window size increases towards 100%. These are headline-worthy results, but they don’t really showcase the panel’s behavior when the remainder of the screen isn’t pure black.
Replacing the background with a dark gray drastically cuts down the peak brightness. That 4000 nit 10% window is now only 1000 nits, and this is realistically as bright as you’ll get in actual content. Still very bright, but not as impressive as the marketing material makes it out to be.
A different way to look at this behavior is to consider the EOTF tracking of the display while in HDR. An ideal display would perfectly track the reference line, i.e. if the HDR signal says to present 1 nit or 4 nits or 4000 nits, the display would do exactly that. Most real TVs can't reach 10000 nits, though, so manufacturers opt to either roll off highlights early in the hopes of maintaining some gradation at the brightest levels or they simply clip any signal above the max brightness of the display. The exact shape of the brightness rolloff is less important than it may seem because it’s very difficult for us humans to see any real distinction between, for example, 3100 nits and 3200 nits in a highlight.
With any window size or background configuration, the U8QG has good to very good EOTF tracking in HDR. With the pure black background, the 10% and 2% windows top out at incredible values: ~3200 and ~2600 nits respectively, only a little dimmer than the screen when in SDR. With a more realistic 10-nit background, those values drop to ~920 and ~1330. Still quite bright and very punchy.
Where the HDR performance suffers is color temperature: the picture is just too cool/blue for dark scenes. While the U8QG is generally hitting the correct nit target (albeit a little brighter than expected at the lowest nit values), color temperature starts rapidly deviating from 6500K, giving scenes a very different feel than what the creators intended.
A great example of this is an outdoor, night scene from Until Dawn on the U8QG compared with Samsung’s S90F OLED. The scene is dark. Very dark. My EOTF measurements start at 0.05 nits, and while that may seem extremely dim, there’s a surprising amount of content, detail, and variation all below 5 nits, and it’s important that displays reproduce this faithfully.
The Samsung OLED tracks 6500K extraordinarily well… down to almost pitch black, giving the scene its intended slate-gray look. The Hisense tracks the EOTF curve well, but for this scene, where almost everything is below 1 nit, the U8QG is incorrectly tinting things blue-green, giving the picture a very different feel than on Samsung’s OLED. This uncontrolled rise in color temperature at very low signal levels seems to be an intractable characteristic of LCD. VA panels also have the disadvantage of a distinct gamma shift for the darkest colors when viewing from off angle (which I promise to touch on soon!), so if you’re planning on watching a lot of dark content, an OLED like the S90F might be a better alternative.
Overall, though, the U8QG’s HDR performance is excellent, and I especially like how Hisense didn’t purposely limit the performance of the TV in SDR, which is most of the content we’ll be seeing for many years to come. Expect a TV with excellent white balance, good gamma and EOTF tracking, and punchy, colorful 1000 nit highlights no matter what you’re watching.
Contrast and Local Dimming
VA panels are great candidates for local dimming because of their high native contrast, and the U8QG is no exception. With LD disabled, I measured a contrast ratio of 5300:1. My review unit has a little cloudiness in the upper-right corner, but nothing truly concerning, and this all but disappears with local dimming enabled.
Hisense gave the 65” variant a 32x64 array for a total of 2048 zones. Blooming is evident on subtitles, mouse cursors, and test patterns (which is how I counted the zones), but I was surprised how seamlessly and unobtrusively Hisense’s LD algorithm behaves in movies and games. Doom, Cyberpunk, Until Dawn… turn on local dimming, don’t think about it, and enjoy. For PC monitor or desktop use, however, local dimming can cause distracting swings in brightness when moving or resizing windows, so here I’d opt to turn it off. You’re still getting a display that can maintain 780 nits fullscreen with the excellent native contrast of a VA panel. And because Hisense’s menus are so quick to navigate, re-enabling local dimming for a gaming session is very fast.
While FALD backlights are allowing VA panels to get much, much brighter than OLEDs, one area where they still fall far behind is in viewing angles. Coming back to Until Dawn, which has a lot of uniform, dark gray scenes, it was clear that the U8QG still has the tell-tale viewing angle gamma shift typical of VA panels, where blacks are elevated outside of a narrow viewing cone. This is evident even at 10 feet, and worse, the cone naturally follows the movement of your head, so the picture is constantly changing – even if in a small way – reminding you that you’re watching a picture on an LCD screen. Unfortunately, this defect is inherent to VA technology, has not been fixed, and will likely never be. This really hurts the realism that otherwise comes from the wide gamut and super bright backlight. The same scene on an OLED, like the Samsung S90F, is a very different experience: the picture is stable, deep, and lifelike at any angle.
Response Times, Gaming, and the U8QG as a PC Monitor
Taking a welcome cue from the PC monitor industry’s ever increasing refresh rate race, Hisense gave the U8 a native 4K refresh rate of 165 Hz with full VRR support. Even stranger for a device intended to be used as a television, there’s a High Refresh Rate mode that allows QHD resolution (2560x1440) at 288 Hz! Someone at Hisense must be a PC gamer. I love this inclusion and the ambition of Hisense to design the U8QG as a dual-use display. The pixel response times of the VA panel simply aren’t good enough to make the U8QG competitive with modern high-refresh PC monitors, but a TV shipping with a 288 Hz mode blows my mind.
I measured the average, gamma-corrected response time at 165 Hz to be around 19.9 milliseconds, which is already slow, but many of the transitions take 25 to 30 ms. The blur is evident on the TestUFO alien, but it gets worse in some games. Objects in motion leave long, smeary trails, and the U8QG exhibits the usual VA weakness for dark-level performance. The high frequency detail of many textures (Skyrim is still my go-to for this) will briefly disappear when in motion, only to reappear when the motion has stopped long enough for these 30 ms transitions to catch up.
That makes the 288 Hz mode fascinating: incredibly smooth and responsive gameplay (1.8 ms of lag is mighty impressive for a TV!) but with last-gen response times. It’s not quite correct to say that the response times aren’t fast enough to support 288 Hz; there is still an enormous benefit to the overall feeling of play, but the experience is a bit surreal: the deep blacks, FALD backlight, and wide color gamut can almost make you forget that the U8QG is still just a VA panel.
Hisense attempted to mitigate this VA weakness by tuning their pixel overdrive, but oddly, they only did this for the 120 Hz mode (or 120 fps in VRR). The graph below shows just one example of how they improved the overall average RT performance down to only 14.3 ms, comparing the black to gray (RGB 0 to 191) transition at 120 Hz with the “faster” 165 Hz mode:
Goosing the 120 Hz transitions with overdrive visibly reduces the blur trail behind objects in motion, and this was one of the first things I noticed about the U8QG’s motion performance. None of the overdriven transitions are even close to overshooting the target RGB level, so there’s no problem with “inverse ghosting”. Hisense has opted to be too conservative with their overdrive tuning, leaving quite a bit of performance on the table. And it’s a little baffling how this tuning wasn’t done at the 165 and 288 Hz modes.
This tuning, specific to the 120 fps region, takes the response times from bad to… not so bad, and if you’ve got a beefy enough system to be playing at these frame rates, you may want to limit your fps to 120. This would be the first time I’d ever recommend going for a lower framerate, but the pixel response is substantially different enough to warrant it.
Unfortunately for Hisense, it’s still the case that if you want the absolute best motion and gaming performance, you’ll need to look at gaming monitors, or, if you want to stay in the TV realm, make the jump to OLED.
Pixel Structure and Text Clarity
The U8QG makes an excellent monitor… as long as you’re not sitting too close. Full RGB information is used for each pixel in PC mode (no 4:2:0 here!), but PC users should know that the U8QG uses a BGR pixel layout, so some text fringing may be visible. And because the individual pixels are split and dimmed in a one third on, two thirds off manner between rows, the picture is susceptible to a “scanlines” effect. The very fine text in the macro image above is supposed to read “Aug,” but it’s a total mess.
In fairness to Hisense, I don’t think most people are going to put a 65” television on their desk. These quibbles I have here mostly disappear at reasonable viewing distances.
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