This Excellent Hisense Mini LED Is One of the Brightest TVs I’ve Ever Tested

8.5/ 10
SCORE

Hisense U8QG

$1,798 at Amazon

$2,200 at Walmart

Pros

• Super bright
• Great gaming features
• Excellent color and contrast

Cons

• Slightly less cinematic image than competing TCL
• Some loss of high-brightness detail in some HDR content

Over the past twenty years as a reviewer, I’ve seen significant improvements to TV picture quality firsthand, largely due to advances in technologies such as OLED, QLED, mini-LED and Dolby Vision. Televisions today are better than ever, and displays with supernova levels of brightness help push the envelope even further.

The Hisense U8QG is the brightest TV I have reviewed (so far), and it complements that brightness with excellent contrast and well-saturated colors. It’s also a solid choice for gamers, with its 165Hz refresh rate and quick response times. Technically, the massive and ridiculously expensive Hisense 116UX is even brighter at around 8,000 nits peak, but I didn’t formally review that model.

The rivalry between TCL and Hisense continues, yet the performance gap between the two companies’ high-end models is smaller than ever. In my review of the TCL QM8K, I found that the TCL is the more cinematic of these two TVs, while the Hisense U8QG is better for gaming.

Even so, both are accomplished performers, and if you’re looking to buy a great LCD-based TV, my advice is to just go for whichever one is cheapest. Conversely, if you want even more brightness, TCL claims its QM9K is capable of up to 6,500 nits — look out for my review on CNET soon.

Read more: Best TVs of 2025

Hisense U8QG series TV sizes

I tested the picture quality of the 65-inch Hisense 65U8QG hands-on, but this review also applies to most of the other screen sizes in the series. While the says the 75-inch model uses a different panel, the other sizes up to 100 inches have similar specifications and should exhibit similar picture quality.

• 55U8QG (55-inch)
• 65U8QG (65-inch)
• 75U8QG (75-inch)
• 85U8QG (85-inch)
• 100U8QG (100-inch)

In the space of two years, Hisense’s TVs have more than doubled in brightness, from the U8K (1,500 nits) to the U8QG (5,000 nits). This is a useful increase, too, as many HDR movies are mastered at higher brightness levels (up to 4,000 nits), and so having a display that is (theoretically) capable of displaying this is a bonus. The company has achieved this increase in brightness through the use of its so-called mini-LED Pro technology and Full Array Local Dimming.

An eye to features

The Hisense U8QG keeps the pedestal design introduced with the U8N, and it felt pretty stable when I put it together. Like with most TVs, you’ll need to buy an external wall mount to attach the Hisense to the wall.

The screen, which features an upgraded Anti-Glare Low Reflection Pro panel, is surrounded by a thin black and silver frame. The back of the TV is mostly plastic with a couple of eyeball-looking speakers at the top.

The U8QG LCD television uses a mini-LED backlight, and the small size of these LEDs enables the TV to have thousands of them. In addition to higher brightness, the TV has also greatly expanded the number of local dimming zones to 5,000 (up from 2,000 in last year’s U8N).

Full-array local dimming allows the screen to dim and brighten different areas simultaneously, ultimately increasing contrast and, therefore, picture quality.

The Hisense U8QG has a claimed 165Hz native refresh rate, which can lead to better motion performance than 60Hz TVs. However, it is mostly designed for gaming. Like most TVs in its class, the U8QG uses quantum dots to improve color performance. The Hisense supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10 high-dynamic-range formats.

The audio system features a six-speaker 4.1.2 Dolby Atmos configuration, but most of these drivers face into the wall or downward. I didn’t test the TV’s sound quality specifically, but upgrading to a budget soundbar would likely sound better.

The Hisense U8QG includes a built-in ATSC 3.0 tuner for NextGen TV broadcasts, but given the format’s slow rollout and the prevalence of FAST TV, you may never use it.

Connections include:

• RF Input with ATSC and ATSC 3.0 tuners

• Wi-Fi 6E, ethernet

• 1x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0

• 4x HDMI (1x eARC)

• Optical digital audio

Hey Google, turn on my TV

It’s not flashy, but Hisense’s Google TV interface is nevertheless excellent for helping you drill into the content you watch the most. A Google TV-based… er… TV also integrates very well into an Android-owning or Google smart home, and you can ask for shows or see your door cam from the couch.

The Hisense remote has a built-in mic with a button, which communicates with Google. If you want to control the TV hands-free, you can turn hands-free on via the TV menu or add a separate Nest mini or other Google Assistant/Gemini speaker.

However, like most versions of Google TV, Hisense’s interface can be quite busy, and it’s largely immune to customization; the only home screen item you can really change is the order of the apps in the shortcut bar. The content recommendations, of which there are many, stay under Google’s control.

For my own tests, I used apps including Netflix and Fandango At Home and found that while it may not have been as speedy to load as a Google TV Streamer, you don’t really need an add-on device.

Although the Hisense does offer a simpler, apps-only mode, just like other devices, including the TCL and the Streamer, it is quite restrictive. The interface looks super simple, with a main carousel image and rows of apps, but search is weirdly disabled.

Hisense U8QG vs. TCL QM8K vs. LG C5 vs. TCL QM851

Picture quality compared

TV and movies

In my testing, including a raft of measurements, it quickly became clear that the Hisense U8QG is a better-performing TV than the one it replaces, and its much-higher brightness is only the start of its improvements. The caveat is that I didn’t watch the two Hisense models together, but I have compared both models’ picture quality with the older TCL QM851.

Starting with the post-apocalyptic action classic Mad Max: Fury Road, I found that it was a close race between the QM8K and the Hisense U8Q. The red desert sands and stark-blue night skies looked best on the Hisense with plenty of saturated colors. Meanwhile, the QM8K had a little more contrast than the Hisense, but it was the LG C5 that came up short with muted highlights compared to the LED TVs.

Next, one of my favorite tests for shadow detail comes through watching the horror movie It. At the start of the movie, Georgie stands at the top of the basement stairs and looks down into the murk below. The Hisense placed equal second with the LG — both exhibited greenish shadows and a little less detail than the QM8K, which had the best picture here. Meanwhile, the TCL QM851 had the objectively worst response with a slightly overblown shadow area, which was way too green.

One slightly disappointing finding I had was that even though the Hisense is capable of very high levels of brightness, I found that it «crushed» some material specifically mastered for higher brightness levels. This was most evident with the Spears and Munsil HDR test disc, which blew out white during a test scene of horses against a snowscape. It looked good at 1,000 nits, but at 4,000, the white details were crushed. It’s worth mentioning that the LG C5 also crushed details a little at this brightness level, but not as significantly — and that most HDR material is still mastered at 1,000 nits, not at 4,000.

This disc is a torture test, though, and in most other scenes the Hisense did well — especially during the high contrast scenes. The Hisense had very little blooming of the objects on the black backgrounds, and it held up well against the OLED. As you’d expect, given its high brightness, the U8QG also had the brightest highlights.

Gaming

I played a variety of games, from shooters to platform games, and, like all of the TVs in my roundup, the Hisense was able to keep its composure without blurring or tearing. Where the Hisense pulled ahead was in its thermonuclear levels of brightness while still maintaining contrast, which made games simply burst with life.

The Hisense was also a little quicker than last year’s. The TCL QM8K isn’t the fastest TV when it comes to displaying games, as my Leo Bodnar tests suggested, but even so, its Game Mode is only about 4ms behind the fastest TVs. In the real world, this isn’t noticeable, but more apparent was that this mode wasn’t as color-saturated as the LG C5 I tested it against.

Bright lighting and off-axis

I watched the Hisense in a lit room and found that it had decent contrast in a lit room, and it was also able to reject a fair amount of ambient light. I next shone my phone’s flashlight directly at the screen from my seating position to simulate the effects of obtrusive light sources such as overhead lamps. The LG C5 may not be as good at killing reflections as the high-end Samsung S95F or Frame TVs, but it was the best of the bunch here. It was followed by the Hisense, which showed a little more of a «starburst» effect in reflections. The two TCL QM8s tied for last in terms of having the most reflectivity.

This year’s TCL QM8K features halo control, which is supposed to improve both blooming and off-axis color shift. Yet even with this technology at hand, I observed the QM8K as only marginally better-looking than the Hisense when viewed off-axis. In both cases, colors still quickly turned to grey if I wasn’t sitting dead-on to the screen. The LG OLED was much better at retaining colors off-axis.

Settings and picture mode notes

While measurements can only tell you so much about a TV’s performance, and direct comparisons between models are just as valuable, the Hisense did put in a good show for the Konica Minolta meter. It was «Good» all across the board for its color, contrast, and brightness. On paper, this thing is a beauty. It’s worth noting that the main change from last year was flipping the 2.4 gamma to 2.20 gamma, which translates to better shadow detail.

Check out how we test TVs for more details on our TV testing methodology.

Portrait Displays Calman calibration software was used in this review.

Portrait Displays Calman calibration software was used in this review.

Read more: How We Test TVs