Hisense - 65" Class U8 Series Mini-LED 4K QLED Google TV

So my 65” tv in my living room I’ve had for 4 years died and I needed to replace it. After buying this Hisense 65U8N I’m glad that happened, all I can say is Wow!!! I am a movie fanatic and this TV does everything I would want a TV to do. The build quality and astetics are museum quality, features like a heavy metal adjustable hight center pedestal, 2.1.2 built in Atmos sound, minimalist bezel, metalic like backlit sleek remote. This TV is like having the best Cineplex in your living room, with Dolby Vision IQ and IMAX Enhanced I have the best 2 theater formats to utilize as well as HDR10 and HDR10+, all the bases are covered. No matter what movie i watch, I’m assured its going to look amazing. Speaking of looks, the black levels are amazing, I bought this set knowing it had 2000 diming zones and it really showcases that especially in dark scenes. This TV is bright, yes very bright, the contrast and colors are reference quality. This TV rivals my OLED in my bedroom with black levels, but has more color pop because of the brightness. I couldn’t recommend this TV more, the value for the quality and performance is there. Rival sets cost double the price, and I have piece of mind with a 2 year manufacturer warranty. If you are looking for what may be the best TV for 2024, especially for movie lovers, look at this Hisense.

If you're reading this chances are that you are aware of the U8 series as one of the best bang for the buck televisions out there and that this year's model specifically has a much higher peak brightness than last year's. So I may as well start there: this thing is BRIGHT. I mean, crazy bright. If you crank the brightness setting and open up the built-in web browser it pretty much goes straight to a fully white screen. And I'm telling you... at this level the TV is brighter than the four lights in my room! It's pretty nuts. Almost overwhelmingly bright. Where you benefit from that the most, of course, is when watching HDR content in any number of apps that support it. My previous television was a decent model with HDR/Dolby Vision support but it's crazy how much better things are now than five years ago, even. Go fire up one of the movies on Disney+ that is IMAX Enhanced and watch this TV completely come to life. I really have no picture complaints at the highest levels. It just handles all of that wonderfully. I've turned off a lot of the motion smoothing options, but other than that I haven't touched any of the settings when in Dolby Vision or HDR 10+. It really is wonderful right out of the box. I will say, I've had a little bit of a time getting some things that are just streaming in 1080p to look great. Some original shows on Netflix, for example. I may just need to do some further tweaking of the settings, or it could just be that this television really highlights things that weren't great looking to begin with. I'm not sure. I do know that just turning off motion smoothing once doesn't mean it's off universally. So you may want to double check those things when bouncing around from app to app. As for Mini-LED vs. OLED, I think it's a case where if you have either you are going to be very happy. If you can afford OLED, have at it. But it's truly a great time where there's an option that's pretty darn close but frequently a good bit cheaper. I have noticed very little blooming, and mainly only when there's white text against a black background. Viewing angles could be better (see pics), but it's perfectly fine for our specific seating arrangement. But if you skipped all of that and just saw this: the picture looks incredible overall. Sound. Here's probably all you need to know: I watched something once for about ten minutes before realizing the sound wasn't coming through my Samsung Dolby Atmos soundbar system and was instead coming out of the TV speakers. I had no idea! It's very impressive. If you don't already have external speakers of some kind, I'd try the TV speakers out and see how important it is to you personally to have something better. You may be able to get by just fine depending on your own tastes. Remote. I think it might be one of my favorites ever. I love the brushed aluminum look and it feels weighty in the hand even though it's plastic. There is some automatic backlighting built in that is very appreciated and the buttons have a great rubbery feel that makes navigation super easy. I like the app shortcut buttons and you can even program one of them to an app or action of your choice. Pretty cool! Pro Tip: use the menu button to make quick picture/sound adjustments. It's easier than going to the settings button, and truthfully a little confusing at first having both. Which brings me to... Google TV. This is my first experience with this OS and there's a lot to like. I prefer it to the blandness of Roku, but it's not as elegant as the AppleTV software. The main page is simple to navigate and signing in with a Google account made a lot of app log ins very easy. Pretty much any app you want is available and I dig the built in "live" TV options. But there are some weird quirks. For starters, there's a library category up top. That's great in theory, but if you have a large library of movies or shows that you own then good look scrolling through it because there's no simple "view all" option. It's insanity. You're better off to search for Google Play Movies app or whatever it's called now, open that up, and scroll through your library that way. And then I ran into this issue where I should be able to use my Google Photos library as a screensaver in "ambient mode." See the picture I attached. I followed the instructions and opened the Google Home app... only to discover using my Google Photos library isn't even listed as an option. Will it ever show up? Who knows! In some ways, I think Google is guilty of what so many of these TV software systems are guilty of: trying to do too much. Just make it easy for me to find stuff. Ah, the modern dilemma... Games. I'm not much of a gamer, but Metroid Prime on the Switch looked incredible. So take that for what it's worth. All in all, this is an easy recommendation. The TV excels at what I want a modern TV to do: light up a room and make HDR content blow my socks (and eyes) off. The design itself is stylish and subtle. The back of the tv actually looks cool! It's heavy and the pedestal seems rock solid. I'm super happy with this set and hope to continually be blown away by it for the next ten years.

I'm really pleasantly surprised! I've only purchased / owned Samsung or LG televisions, and wasn't sure how this one would compare. After waiting several days for a Friend or Family to come and help me put it together, I decided to just do it myself as I had with my smaller sets before. Out of the box, it is a pretty nice looking unit. Slim, modern. Although it was heavier than my previous sets, it wasn't so bad that I couldn't lift it up quickly to lie flat on the bed so I could attach the base. Now, the base IS HEAVY!? Steel, iron, felt like it had to weigh 30lbs on its own. Once I attached it, it took me about 20 minutes of very careful maneuvering using an ottoman, then a chair, to get it lifted up onto my console. But I got it up there! 😁 To the Ladies, try to get help if you can, but be prepared to sweat if you can't! It is larger than I imagined as well, looks AWESOME in my smaller living room. I went back and forth about the 65" or the 75", 65" is perfect. Think 75" would have been too large. For reference, my living room is rectangular and approx. 20' x 14', something like that. It's got great colors and everything looks really nice on screen. The two issues I'm encountering, though, are the adaptive picture options are too obvious when adapting. It's distracting. The setting that seems to work for me is Theater Night. The other problem is that the remote can only be connected to my soundbar via Bluetooth, I can't find a way to set it up to operate the soundbar directly, if that makes sense. When the remote is paired to it through Bluetooth, the volume doesn't change very much when you turn it up. I ended up just disconnecting it and using the soundbar remote. Don't like having to use two remotes, but maybe it's something I'm doing wrong and can figure out later. I will say the sound from the TV itself is actually very good. Has a subwoofer in the back. After a few days, I might try just using it on its own. We'll see. All in all, I think this is a very nice, affordable TV with all the bells and whistles. I'm an Android girl so it being a Google TV is so great, I signed in and all of my accounts and info synced up. I'm glad I got it!