This year has been an emotional rollercoaster for buyers with so many great TVs fighting for our wallets, and just when I thought I could finally make my decision and buy a new TV, Hisense sent over their new 85U8N, and it's given me an experience I’ll have a really hard time going back from. Alas I’m back to square one on my TV purchasing decision, and in today’s review let’s discuss why.
Hisense is delivering great value and incredible immersion with their 2024 85” U8N Mini LED TV. After this experience, going back to a TV smaller than 85 inches will be a difficult decision, which means for the price, I’ll be heavily considering a Mini LED this year. Additionally, the menu is incredibly fast, the brightness is great, and it makes a mockery of non mini LED displays in terms of depth and contrast.
Unfortunately this year's 85” model appears to be somewhat of a refresh with only 1,296 dimming zones, meanwhile the 75” has nearly 2,000. Not only that, but motion performance suffers due to the VA panel, the sound is somewhat thin, the viewing angles can still be an issue, and I had a few bugs that required a reset.
Despite that it gives great HDR imagery at an affordable price, and at its lowest price it’s an excellent option.
For this review I’ll be using an X-Rite i1 Pro spectrophotometer, Color Checker Display Plus colorimeter, Calman Ultimate, Portrait Displays Video Forge Pro 8K pattern generator, a Sony RX100 VII 1000fps camera, an SM208 Screen Luminance Meter, & a Sony Cinema Line FX3 mirrorless video camera. All together at least $12,000 worth of testing equipment alone and of course years of experience testing displays.
Disclaimer: This TV was provided free by Hisense for me to keep, however all opinions are my own, and no talking points or scores were dictated.
Overall the specs are similar to previous years models.
Above is the Connectivity for this TV, and thankfully it comes with two HDMI 2.1 ports allowing for multiple 4K 144Hz connections and a sound bar or DVD player.
The Hisense 85U8N unboxing experience is a bit scary as after opening the box like a car door, the instructions ask multiple people to set it upright on the styrofoam side protectors while assembling the stand.
Overall I’d like to see the unboxing and assembly see some improvements to reduce the risk of damaging the display, and honestly you may want three people for this task to be safe.
Let's start off with the color because I actually think overall it's great. It can often look even better than WOLED from LG in HDR thanks to the fact that there's not a white sub pixel, leading to some really bright colors. But I do think it falls a little bit short of the saturation you can get out of QD OLED. Despite that, yes, colors are going to look very vivid, very bright, and HDR is incredibly impressive on this 85 inch TV.
In fact HDR on this set is a level of immersion I got to be honest, I've yet to see on any other TV I've reviewed thus far. I’ve never actually reviewed an 85” TV before, and coming from a 77” It’s actually a huge increase in immersion in my opinion, and with bright, accurate HDR, It makes for an incredible experience. Though I'm sure I’ll be blown away again with even larger and brighter TVs coming out in not too long, especially the U9N and UX options from Hisense which promise to bring upgrades in almost every area over the U8N, though let’s save that for a future, more expensive review.
Now for movie enthusiasts and professionals below will be details on the accuracy, though feel free to skip this if you just want to know if it looks good.
Additionally below it can be seen that the 85U8N has excellent HDR color volume exceeding 100% DCI-P3 meaning the vast majority of HDR content should be viewable as the creator intended.
Overall the 85U8N has very good SDR and HDR accuracy ensuring highlights and shadows are faithfully represented and avoiding massively crushed or over-brightened details.
But what about the brightness? This has got to be one of the most important metrics for HDR, and my first impressions were, wow, this can get really bright, especially in high APL scenes such as a beach with a bright sun that might push OLEDs beyond their limits. And you can click below for more details on how it stacks up against other TVs.
Testing Deep Dive - Brightness:
While the U8N can get incredibly bright and in very demanding scenes will beat OLED, in most content it will likely trade blows with the brightest OLEDs meaning it may not be a good idea to buy over OLED based on this metric alone.
While the contrast can reach unbelievably high numbers in ideal conditions, in my contrast ratio checkerboard test, I found overall it does give roughly a 40,000 to one contrast ratio, which to put in perspective is good for a mini LED TV.
I would consider a hundred thousand to one or higher in this test to be ideal and around 20,000 to one to be ok. So this is solid for a mini LED display, but it's going to fall far short of the essentially infinite contrast that an OLED can produce, meaning it won't have quite the same amount of micro contrast as you can get in small objects on an OLED TV.
In terms of local dimming, unfortunately 1,296 just isn’t enough to exceed the ideal contrast ratio, and it leads to some noticeable haloing around bright objects against a dark background, or even inverse dimming making bright objects appear darker than they should.
I got to give Hisense some props for judder control as if you max it out, while it can introduce some soap opera effect, which may or may not be a turn off for some buyers, it completely eliminates all 24p judder allowing for very smooth playback.
Gaming on the 85U8N is a real treat as not only do you get the incredible immersion of such a large display, but it also feels incredibly responsive, especially in the 144Hz mode when used on PC.
Testing Deep Dive - Latency:
Now it’s not the fastest display I’ve ever used, but as you can see the latency is roughly in line with competing options from other companies.
However, the motion performance isn't that great. Now it's certainly not terrible at 144Hz, it's definitely very usable, but when you compare it to something like OLED, well it's just no match, especially for a super fast OLED like 480Hz, but even a lower refresh rate OLED is going to look far clearer in motion than this mini LED, which as you can see in the darker scenes smearing likely due to the VA panel, which means probably not the absolute best option when it comes to gaming, but definitely very usable.
Now text clarity looks better to me than OLED, but it still can have some issues because it appears to be BGR, not the typical red green blue that Windows would expect when displaying text.
The U8N appears to be using somewhat of a semi-gloss coating, this can introduce some very minor blur to the overall image, nowhere near as bad as a matte coating, but not quite as clear as a true gloss. To be fair, when you're viewing at a distance, this is very unlikely to have a major impact on the overall picture, but it's something that I would like to see them change with future revisions.
Now in terms of the viewing angles in uniformity, much like other Mini LEDs, it's not perfect. It's going to have a very washed out or desaturated image at significant angles, and it does also unfortunately suffer from some dirty screen effect, which means that gray screens or other colors could look slightly dirty.
Another issue I found with this TV was that the sound, in my opinion, was not that great. Now it's not terrible, but it was a little bit thin, the timbre was a bit off. Additionally the mids, and bass certainly did seem to lack a lot of the body that I'd hoped to see. So if you do buy this TV, I would highly, highly recommend pairing it with a great sound system to get the most out of your purchase.
The menu was excellent and in my opinion is way faster and more enjoyable than either LG or Samsung’s offerings, however I did run into some issues with the TV overall. Engaging VRR seems to make the screen dimmer and a bit more dull, which is unfortunate and something I'd like to see them address in the future for a more update. Additionally I did spot very, very tiny, mostly unnoticeable diagonal scan lines on certain gradients, although I'm unsure if this will affect other models.
Finally the menu and firmware for me did have a few bugs, which unfortunately I had to actually unplug the TV as well as reset it to fix them, but once I did that, those bugs never came back. So it's hard to say whether or not something you'll face, but it's something I had to deal with.
So there you have it. The 85” 2024 Hisense U8N definitely isn’t a perfect TV. There’s a few things that I think Hisense needs to improve upon but their tracking in HDR is really good, and for the price it's a really great deal, offering an experience no OLED can rival. Size. After using this 85” TV for a while It's going to be hard for me to go back to a 77” or 65” TV, especially in larger rooms, which is likely all you’ll be able to buy at around the same price with an OLED.
In fact I was so impressed by the grandiose picture that I’m seriously considering picking up an even larger 98UX for my personal use at some point and I’m looking forward to reviewing it if I get the chance, because Hisense really has something special with their lineup this year, especially their high end models if the specs translate into an even better experience than the already impressive 85U8N, but of course, it will come at a cost.
That's where the 85U8N comes in. I was shocked to see it available briefly at under $1,799.99, and if you can find it for that price it's definitely a TV I can recommend considering the value it presents.
Best Buy
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