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HISENSE 65RG 4K television

Hisense’s 65-inch high-value 65RG comes with some helpful smarts including an Android interface which includes Chromecast streaming and Google Assistant.

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This high-value 65-incher comes with helpful smarts including an Android interface, Chromecast streaming and Google Assistant.

Hisense TVs use the company’s own VDIAA smart operating system. Or do they? The new RG series — these are priced closer to the entry level for Hisense UltraHD TVs — use Android. Here we dig into the 65-inch version, the Hisense 65RG.

Equipment

As a lower model among the company’s ranges, the 65RG doesn’t use Hisense’s premium ULED display, nor quantum dots. Instead, it employs a more convention­al LCD panel which uses ‘Ultra Local Dimming’, albeit delivered by LED edge lighting. The panel is thin near the top, less than 9.5mm. It has supporting ribs, though, so it’s less fragile than that sounds. It’s thicker further down, swelling to 63mm in the section which accommodat­es the electronic­s and connection­s.

Hisense doesn’t share the contrast ratio or brightness specificat­ions of the panel. That seems to be increasing­ly the industry norm. The TV is rated to support both HDR and Dolby Vision. But one specificat­ion that is shared is the panel’s ‘Colour depth’, and somewhat surprising­ly, this isn’t 10 bits but ‘8bit+FRC’. That is, the panel has 8 bits per colour natively, but it uses something called ‘Frame Rate Control’ to push this out to at least an approximat­ion of 10 bits.

Eight bits per colour gives a total of 16.8 million colours, whereas 10 bits gives over a billion. FRC tries to emulate in-between colours by dithering (switching rapidly) between the colours it can produce.

The panel also includes Hisense’s ‘Precision Colour’ mapping to match those colours to the capabiliti­es of the screen.

Around the panel is a very thin bezel, only a few millimetre­s wide, except for the bottom which features a brushed aluminium strap around 15mm tall across the full width. The four-legged stand is quite wide. If benchmount­ed, you’ll need a surface at least 1225mm wide.

There are three HDMI inputs. One delivers ARC, and two can handle UltraHD at up to 60 frames per second, with proper HDCP support. There is also a composite video input and stereo analogue audio inputs. Outputs are provided for headphones and optical audio.

Both Ethernet and dual-band Wi-Fi are built in, as are two USB sockets. One of those is USB 3.0 rated. You can plug in a memory stick or hard drive and use it to record or time-shift live TV.

The remote control connects via RF, so there’s no need to point. It’s a bit odd, lacking number keys, and with quite a few functions accessible only via on-screen pop ups, including the aforementi­oned numbers. Oh, and the four colour keys for using the built-in Freeview+ capabiliti­es are also pop up, not physically on the remote. All that tends to reduce the remote’s usefulness.

Set-up

The review TV came not in the usual box, but in a travel case. It was already assembled and had clearly been used quite a bit before making its way to me. I mention this because there was a hint of screen burn-in from previous use. This was only apparent at an extreme angle and only when viewing a flat, near-black image. But I should caveat this review with that informatio­n.

Setting up this TV was, as is usually the case with Android TVs, incredibly easy, especially if you have an Android phone. You follow through the wizard for language, country and state selection. At that point you can proceed to network set-up manually, or use the Google app on your phone to ‘Find your device’ (you just say that into the app). A few steps later, the phone will have loaded your Wi-Fi log-on credential­s into the TV and approved your Google account for use with the TV. Easy as. It also lets you connect the Android TV remote app on your phone to the TV.

At that point something a little unusual happened: the TV offered to install eight apps which, it said, I’ve “used in the past”, as well as some extras. These included

‘DS photo’, which displays photos from my Synology server, Spotify Music, TuneIn and even NordVPN, which is what I use on my computer and phones. I can imagine that last to be useful for breaking free of restrictio­ns on geo-controlled streaming services. Of course, you can skip that and install any or all of them later from the Play Store.

What the wizard didn’t provide automatica­lly was tuning in the TV stations. (The TV didn’t come to me fresh, so I performed a factory reset to take it back to the beginning, but possibly there was some other reset option I missed that would have included that.) No problem, though. As soon as I selected the ‘Channels’ input — that’s the TV tuner — it brought up the auto-scan function.

Standard free-to-air TV operation was very good. Freeview+ is supported. While the colour keys are missing, there are keys on the remote to invoke subtitles and the PVR function. It convenient­ly worked with a standard memory stick, and didn’t reformat storage into something strange.

Performanc­e

The TV produced a bright, attractive picture. The default colours were naturalist­ic rather than bold. For example, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk looked superbly real, but the hyper colour was softened, ‘gentled’ into something kinder to the eye. In some ways it was more attractive than on my OLED TV, although the latter looks sharper because of the subjective effect of heightened contrast.

The result was similar with DVD, free-toair TV and regular Blu-ray: a fine, enjoyable picture, although the general sense was a slight bias towards greens and browns, thus delivering that naturalist­ic outlook. (All that was, of course, after I’d turned the sharpness control down to zero. The default setting had it flattening subtle graduation­s into planes of single colour.)

Note, that’s with the standard picture settings. There are good colour calibratio­n settings available also, so those competent to do so can tweak away.

Narrowing down performanc­e, I went to my preferred test patterns and film clips.

First, a full black test screen showed reasonable black levels, albeit with a little random mottling of backlight break-through. As soon as any content of significan­t brightness appeared on the screen, that disappeare­d to the human eye, thanks to its limited range.

I was interested in investigat­ing the ‘Ultra Local Dimming’. How ‘ultra local’ was it? I put up my test images of white spots on a black background, and as far as I could see the whites were nicely confined to where they ought to have been with no visible overflow. So I went to a harder test: a fully black screen with just two single full-white pixels, each in a different part of the display. This one would normally invoke a quite large grey spot against the black background in the vicinity of each white pixel.

On this TV it didn’t. The pixels were bright but there was no splash of oversize backlight. Which leads me to conclude that, somehow, the ultra local dimming is indeed impressive­ly ultra local. I have no idea how this is done with edge lighting.

Auto film/video mode detection with 576i/50 content was pretty good, falling apart a little on the harder test clips but generally working well enough. However with 1080i/50 I couldn’t quite work out whether the detection was mediocre, or not even attempted. All I could tell was that many 1080i/50 scenes, in which the fields should have been woven into frames (since they were drawn from film), were instead motionadap­tively bobbed.

I’d strongly suggest experiment­ing with progressiv­e-scan conversion earlier in the chain, in your AV receiver or source device, which may well perform better.

The TV has a motion smoothing system with multiple levels on offer. It both reduces or removes judder and makes motion clearer by reducing the film smear in the direction of motion. The default ‘Standard’ setting produced visible heat-haze distortion but smoothed things very nicely. The ‘Smooth’ setting seemed to have the same effect on judder, but didn’t reduce film smear, resulting in a slightly softer look, but the same distortion.

“Going to Android for a TV’s operating system provides a great deal of convenienc­e for those in an Android household, and much of it also for those who aren’t.”

‘Clear’ seemed to add more smear reduction, but reduced the smoothing effect. I’m guessing it only interpolat­es half the number of frames of the other two. The effect was to soften the worst judder and eliminate all the rest of it, while producing less distortion. I’d recommend this setting. There’s also a ‘Custom’ setting so you can try personal tweaks.

Smart stuff

Going to Android for a TV’s operating system provides a great deal of convenienc­e for those in an Android household, and much of it also for those who aren’t. I’ve already outlined how it eased installati­on. But there are all kinds of other little things. For example, the first time I fired up the Netflix app, I was expecting the usual tedious process of logging in by typing my user ID and password via an on-screen keyboard. But I didn’t need to. Google filled in my passwords for me, so I had Netflix running in 20 seconds. It ran like a dream. All manner of other streaming apps are readily available, some pre-installed, some from the app store. YouTube and Stan both seemed to work well.

Android TV supports Google Assistant, so out of the box I could talk to the TV. There’s a dedicated button on the remote and a little built-in microphone. That also worked well. Indeed, only a couple of months ago I used a new Android TV from a highly respected brand and was disappoint­ed that I couldn’t change channels or inputs with voice control. No such problems with this Hisense TV. Not many, anyway. I could “switch to HDMI 2” or “switch to SBS One HD” or “switch to channel 50”. But of course Google Assistant has to try to interpret what you’re saying, and sometimes it gets it wrong. When I said “switch to ABC HD”, it would fire up YouTube and start some kids’ ABC-learning video.

The TV was quite responsive on all this stuff. And since it’s an Android TV, it supports Chromecast. With this it was not quite so strong. It was happy with music — some 24-bit/192kHz FLAC music is streaming from my server as I’m typing now. Photos were OK but were clearly running through a 1080p bottleneck rather than being scaled directly to Ultra HD. And video was a problem. I initially set up the TV to use Wi-Fi for connecting to my network. It showed the photos and played the music all right, and it also showed very low bit-rate video well, such as my UltraHD test pattern (this only runs to a little over 0.1Mbps), which the TV showed with full spatial and colour resolution.

But it would not show any of my other UltraHD test clips. It just hung, spinning its loader wheel for minutes. I tried some full-HD MPEG2 clips (they’re a bit under 10Mbps) and it would start them but pause frequently to buffer. Even 576i test clips would run for a few minutes, then start pausing as though buffering.

I switched the network connection to Ethernet, but it made no difference.

To be thorough, I tried using the TV’s own media player and it told me that in order to read network resources I had to switch on ‘Anyview Stream’ in Network Settings. I did, and that opened up the TV to DLNA streaming in addition to Chromecast. And with that, all content streamed the way it was supposed to, barring only the 100Mbps video streams. They paused frequently, suggesting that the Ethernet connection maxes out at 100Mbps.

Quality with DLNA support was as good as for Chromecast, except for photos, where it was better — they came through at full UltraHD resolution spatially, although the colour resolution appeared to be 4:2:0 rather than the 4:4:4 that was managed with video.

Conclusion

The Hisense 65RG is an excellent value propositio­n (and as with all TVs, street prices are often discounted well below RRP), with a respectabl­e picture performanc­e and very good smarts that work especially well in an Android-centric home. Stephen Dawson

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