A first look at Hisense’s 2024 TV lineup already impresses | Digital Trends

Let’s take a look at teh 2024 lineup in as organized a manner as we can.

The Hisense ULED lineup starts with the U6 at the lower end, then the U7, and then you get to the U8 series. That’s simple enough.

One of the little quirks that bugged me about the Hisense U8N was that if you turned the volume all the way down — not muted, just turned down — you got this mute icon in the upper right of the screen, and you couldn’t turn it off. I talked to Hisense engineers about that, and they are working on an update to remove that.

Like the U8N, the Hisense U9 has a broad range of adjustments that will allow you to dial it in for viewing in a very dark room, or in a very bright room (or if you just like an extremely bright picture). Honestly, I have never tested brighter TVs than those that I tested here at Hisense’s event. And I mean brighter by a significant margin.

The 75-inch U9 I tested has a claimed peak brightness up to 4,000 nits. I actually got 4,500 nits, and it held that number for about 2 whole seconds, which is longer than it sounds in the context of moving content. It then dimmed down to 3,000 nits — which, as a reminder, is still brighter than most TVs can get.

And that the brightness power is being handled responsibly. It pokes at you from little highlights in HDR content, and it helps lift SDR content a bit by raising the average picture level high enough that the image can do battle with almost any level of ambient light and still appear to be high contrast.

Speaking of contrast, Hisense told me approximately how many zones the U9 models use. And, frankly, it doesn’t matter. It’s a lot of zones. Probably more zones than it needs to pull off the nearly bloom-free and halo-free images I’m seeing. What really matters is that the backlight control system can operate swiftly. And at least with Peak brightness on high and local dimming on high, I am seeing no fluctuations. But take that with some skepticism because I did not have time to torture test the TVs just yet.

If you do want lightning-fast backlight response, though, the U9 (and up) offers a feature you won’t find on other Hisense TVs that speeds up the backlight at the expense of brightness. It’s kind of like black-frame insertion, I’m told. But according to our camera, it is not black frame insertion because there is no recordable flicker.

That’s about as much info as I have on this feature — Hisense didn’t have much in the way of details to share. But it’s an interesting one to see nonetheless.

Just as the measurements suggested, color was spot-on and well saturated, The TV does 100%of DCI-P3 and about 77% of BT.2020. As for motion? There’s just a bit of judder in 24 frames-per-second (fps) content, even with Hisense’s film motion setting on. But that’s nothing to get upset about.

Upscaling and image cleanup looked really good to me in the short time I had with the TV. I watched about 40 minutes of various YouTube videos at differing levels of quality and didn’t see any egregious color banding or macroblocking, nor did I see a bunch of noise. I’d need to put the U9 side by side with the U8 to compare the different processors. The U9 gets Hisense’s best processor — just like the UX series — and all the content I watched looked great.

I think the biggest improvement in the U9 over the U8, though, is the use of the ADS Pro panel. Having this great picture quality available at more angles, and thus more seating positions, is just so important. This is a big upgrade, and one reason I might suggest getting a 75-inch U9 over an 85-inch U8 this year, if picture quality trumps size on your list of priorities.

I’m not shocked by anything I’ve seen so far. Hisense has made all the right improvements to its processing, and it’s on the record as saying it wants to provide the brightest, highest-value TVs on the market. It’s dialed in the accuracy for Filmmaker and Theater picture modes. The interface is snappy. The processing is solid, especially for the price, so you’re getting cleaner images from cable and satellite signals, and the motion is well within acceptable parameters for movies. For what you spend on these TVs, it’s just overwhelming.

So that’s an early look at the U9. You may have noticed I didn’t talk about the speakers, and that’s because the audio tuning is not yet done. (And, frankly, the room in which I tested the U9 would have been terrible for audio.) I won’t test the audio until I can get it in our studio. But as a reminder, the U8N’s subwoofer is something of a marvel. And the U9, with its forward-firing side-mounted speakers (which, I know many of you are going to hate), is supposed to be much better.

I also have nothing to compare the U9 to yet. It’s early days. Hisense got me the U8N super early, but we’ll have to wait a while for a U9 to land at the studio. That’s OK … I think it’ll be worth the wait.

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