HISENSE IS a major supplier of all types of appliances but is known here in the USA and in much of the world for its video products, including short-throw projectors and flat-screen televisions. The Hisense 65-inch, 65U8K, under review here, offers a wide range of features, but perhaps the most jaw-dropping is the price for Hisense’s top-of-the-line 65-incher.
While Samsung (Korea), LG (Korea), and Sony (Japan) remain the worldwide television sales leaders, two Chinese companies, Hisense and TCL, are charging hard and hold the four and five spots, respectively. Hisense first came to our attention as a leading supplier of short-throw home projectors and for their company name, a curious collision of English words (High + Sense).
All of Hisense’s flat-screen TVs are LCD or LED-LCD designs. The company doesn’t offer OLEDs. Nevertheless, nothing appears to have been left out of Hisense’s top-of-the-line, U8K-Series. Their mini-LED local dimming offers enough zones (Hisense doesn’t specify exactly how many) to almost make you forget about OLED’s leadership in the deep-black-levels club. And at the opposite end there was enough brightness on hand to prompt me to dial it back a bit even on SDR material. Is it the absolutely brightest 65-inch LCD set you can buy? Perhaps not, but do you need brighter, even for HDR? I doubt it, unless you plan on watching the big game on the sun porch by the pool in Florida at noon on a cloudless day in July!
SETUP AND FEATURES
You can’t miss the Hisense’s features even before unpacking it; they’re printed right on the box: 2-year warranty, Wi-Fi, Filmmaker Picture Mode, Google TV, Dolby Vision Atmos (sic: actually Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos; they’re separate features that are often but not always found together on a given source, but
