HISENSE 75U80G 8K television
Once you get to 75 inches of premium TV, is 4K UHD resolution enough to make the most of your screen real estate?
Once you get to 75 inches, is 4K UHD resolution enough to make the most of your screen real estate? We get hands-on with this 8K TV.
The first wave of 8K televisions seemed almost absurdly redundant. Quadrupling the resolution of 4K Ultra HD, which had itself quadrupled the resolution of Full-HD, seemed potentially excessive when few people were watching even 4K content, and there was no 8K content at all, except a few test scenes generated for the purpose of 8K demonstrations. We saw first Japan’s Sharp launching an 8K TV in Europe, then South Korea’s LG and Samsung presented their 8K TVs to Australian audiences and the rest of the world. At that stage we were somewhat dismissive of the need for 8K. Others pointed out that the higher resolution is impossible for the eye to discern at any normal watching distance. What was the point, we asked, except to have something new to sell?
Well, as this 8K TV arrives, the first we’ve seen from a Chinese manufacturer, our view has since softened. There’s now plenty of 4K content, either streaming or on UHD Blu-rays, if not yet a flurry of 8K, although you can make your own with cameras such as Canon’s EOS R5 and the new Sony Alpha I (both mirrorless cameras). Panasonic’s Lumix S1H does 6K. And our Damascene moment came during a full review of Samsung’s current 8K LED, which has such excellent upscaling that we have found ourselves watching, say, the 4K remasters of The Hobbit movies while sitting on a chair within a metre of the screen. With a 75-inch screen (and anything less really is pointless for 8K), then this can deliver unbelievable resolution, with a viewing angle even home projection can’t match.
We didn’t get long enough with Hisense’s first 8K TV to watch a full movie: they wouldn’t deliver it to us for review, something in which they’re not alone with such large TVs; vendors tend to be reluctant to ship them for temporary installation. So we saw the 75U80G ULED 8K TV in the offices of Hisense Australia’s PR firm in Sydney. Further, the TV there was a handbuilt sample, though we were assured it was representative of what the final production units are like. Most likely they will be better, since most TVs receive firmware upgrades early in their production lives as real-world issues arise.
Equipment
As its name suggests, this TV is another mighty 75-incher — around 190cm — in size. This size of TV precludes the absolute thinness of glass-like panels for rigidity’s sake, but this TV is nevertheless impressively sleek in appearance, slim in bezel, with a somewhat spidery stand. We can’t speak as to how easy it is to physically
install, not having done so. The TV looked to have four mounting points for a standard VESA-compliant wall-mounting bracket.
All the connections — four HDMI, two USB, one aerial, one analogue AV in, one optical digital audio out, one headphone out — were set into a slim vertical panel on the back that was at 90 degrees to the screen. In other words, all the plugs went in sideways, which allows the panel to pushed back very close to the wall if it’s so mounted.
A word on ULED: Hisense is at pains to note that while it uses Quantum Dot technology for its increased colour control and efficiency (which can mean higher brightness or reduced power, depending on the design decisions), the ULED designation packages its whole range of picture processing features, not the least being the Full Array Dimming Pro backlighting. Hisense is coy about the numbers in this, as are most other brands, for reasons that elude me. But they will say that ‘Pro’ means greater than one hundred individual backlighting zones.
The panel is 8 bits (256 levels per colour, 16.7 million colours in total), Hisense says, rather than 10 bits (1024 levels, over a billion colours), but it uses FRC — frame rate control — to rapidly toggle each subpixel between adjacent states, which it says effectively adds two more bits.
Hisense rates the panel at up to 1000 nits peak brightness. Two of the HDMI inputs are rated to 8K at 60p, and 4K at 120p. For gamers the TV supports Hisense’s Game Mode Pro. This is an auto-detect thing, such that if you plug in, say, an Xbox Series X (or a Sony PlayStation 5, when it incorporates the promised upgrade) which employs such features as Variable Refresh Rate, the TV will respond to the source, adjusting its frame rate to match rendering capabilities.
The TV runs Android TV and comes with a Bluetooth remote control which avoids the need for line-of-sight control.
In use
Just because we travelled to the TV didn’t mean we came completely unequipped. We brought an Oppo BDP-203AU Ultra-HD player and a collection of discs chosen to highlight different aspects of performance, starting at the top in terms of technical specifications: Gemini Man on 4K Blu-ray. It runs at 2160p/60 and includes Dolby Vision. The start is always inauspicious with regard to the 60fps frame rate because the Paramount logo seems to run at 30fps, and the second logo, from Skydance, has been crudely converted from 24fps. There’s a lot of juddering. But the movie itself was both sharp and smooth. The HFR is evident not just as smoother motion, although it delivers that in abundance, but also enhanced visual sharpness. If there were any processing defects resulting from the upscaling to
8K, the 8K panel made them too small to see. Most impressive, near the start of the second chapter is a scene with yachts in the background, the various ropes and ties sliding across each other as they bob on the water. They remained smooth with no apparent aliasing, despite the upscaling of resolution.
With Dolby Vision, TVs are locked into certain visual settings with little ability to adjust them. This TV had been tuned for a naturalistic appearance, it seemed. Not quite as rich as OLED, as far as we could judge, but perhaps more believable.
Stepping down in source quality a very long way, we plonked a 576i/50 test DVD into the Oppo and delivered its contents to the TV at native resolution. The first clip was an old ABC test pattern captured from free-to-air broadcast many years ago. Hisense is pretty proud of its AI upscaling. This has been trained to recognise various patterns over hundreds of thousands of iterations, and optimise scaling for those patterns. We can’t check all those thousands, of course, or even know what they are, but the ABC test pattern has a block with diagonal lines, and these were rendered smoothly and extremely sharply. They may as well have been delivered at 8K rather than being upsampled from 576i. That’s a 7.5-to-1 upscaling, or 56 times the original number of pixels. A naive conversion would have had them looking like a staircase. A slightly less naive conversion would have had them smooth, but very fuzzy.
Curiously the AI was less clear about what to do with horizontal lines, leaving them relatively fuzzy. And with unfamiliar shapes, it didn’t really know what to do. The Oppo screen saver logo, which is white on black, delivered at 576i/50, ended up looking very wobbly.
The 576i/50 deinterlacing was fairly competent, albeit with the
TV inclined to inappropriately slip back from film-mode to video-mode deinterlacing a bit more readily than is the norm in premium TVs these days. In practice, video comparable to our torture-test scenes will rarely appear in program material, so most users should be happy with the results when feeding native 576i/50 to the TV.
Jumping up to 1080i/50, like the Blu-ray of Miss Potter, the TV mostly used the correct deinterlacing approach; we’d score it about average there. We asked a chap from Hisense if the TV used its object/shape/edge idenfication AI features for motion smoothing as well as scaling. He was uncertain, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it did. Using scenes from The Fugitive, the ‘Standard’ setting for motion smoothing was first class: super smooth and with no artefacts.
Blacks levels were good. With the PR office’s lights turned off things weren’t entirely dark, but reasonably so. Using test patterns — nasty full-white on full-black ones — the backlighting was nicely confined to an area quite close to large objects. In real-world content you’re unlikely to notice the splash over the edges of contrast objects. It was obvious only on a ‘Starfield’ video which has white dots of one to a few pixels moving across the screen, as though you’re speeding through some starfield. You could see the backlighting zones showing up here, and there, and over there, as required to make sure the stars shone. Where the stars shone, the surrounding black turned dark grey.
Smarts
Hisense smart TVs come with either Android or the company’s own VIDAA smart system. It usually prefers the latter for its premium models — controlling its own system and chipsets, it isn’t beholden to any other business — but I understand that COVID-related supply issues delayed VIDAA for this year’s 8K models. Android is, of course, a very solid product (we prefer it to VIDAA). And it includes Google Assistant. So of course there’s a Google Assistant button on the remote control. But the TV also has microphones, so you can just speak to it like any Google speaker, with the added feature of controlling TV functions and searching for programmes.
And, of course, it has a discreet hardware slide switch on the front panel so that you can physically defeat the microphone.
When we saw this TV, there was a little bit of uncertainty about final functionality: do you need to have the TV switched on to use Google Assistant? Even in standby mode, the TV does presently listen, and four little LEDs in a row under the TV panel light up just like on a Google speaker if you say, ‘Hey Google’. And indeed, you can even switch on the TV by command. But it was unable to use its speakers to provide answers to mundane questions when switched off. This may or may not be altered in newer versions of the firmware.
Otherwise, Android on this TV worked as Android does on any TV with sufficient processing power: smoothly and effectively. And this TV’s quad core processor clearly provided sufficient processing power.
The office Wi-Fi at the test site was good for 75Mbps internet connections. We checked out some 4K Netflix. David Attenborough’s cultured tones were accompanied by jittery sharks swimming through the ocean. Checking the picture settings we found that Motion Enhancement was off. You need it on for Netflix because Netflix sends everything at 60Hz. Clearly Our Planet was captured at 24p. The clarity of this TV meant the conversion judder (AAA-BB-CCC-DD) was easily visible. Just keep motion smoothing on for Netflix. Most importantly, the picture was beautiful and rich.
A little 8K stuff streamed from YouTube dropped quite a few frames, so the internet pipe clearly wasn’t quite fat enough for that.
Finally, our own 8K test patterns, fed via USB, were USB-bottlenecked to 4K, though 4K images come through intact. We would have liked to check an 8K feed to the unit via HDMI, but we don’t yet have an 8K-output device to check that with.
Conclusion
For the most part, the main job of an 8K TV as the world stands today is to deliver smooth, engaging imagery from lower resolution sources. Such as we can judge from this brief hands-on, the Hisense 75U80G ULED TV easily does that. And with its 75 inches, it fills any room with high-quality picture.