The U8K TV Review: A Mixed Bag of Issues and Promises

As a reviewer who often gets early access to TVs, I've encountered my fair share of issues that can affect the final product. Recently, I was sent a Hisense U8K TV for review, and while it's doing many things right, there are two major concerns that need to be addressed before I can confidently recommend it.

One issue I've noticed is with the blue color on this TV, specifically Cyan. As you can see from the screenshots, the blue color is way off, measuring significantly worse than the rest of the colors on the TV. This is an anomaly, as all other colors are measuring well, and I've brought it up to Hisense, who are unable to replicate the issue. It's clear that this is not a widespread problem with the TV itself, but rather something specific to this particular sample.

Another issue I've encountered is with Filmmaker Mode HDR. This mode isn't working as expected, with brightness capping at around 600 nits, compared to the claimed 1500 nits. This is a significant difference, and it's disappointing that Hisense's own claims don't seem to match the actual performance of this TV. I've tested other HDR modes on this TV, and they're working as expected, which makes this issue all the more puzzling.

The fact that these two issues exist means that I can't trust with 100% certainty that this is the best Hisense has to offer, or what you'll experience at home. As a reviewer, it's my responsibility to provide accurate and unbiased feedback, and if I'm not confident in the product, I shouldn't recommend it.

That's why I've decided to send this TV back to Hisense and wait for a replacement. Once I receive the new unit, I'll be able to give you my full review of the U8K TV. In the meantime, I want to highlight that there are many aspects of this TV where it's excelling. The white balance and grayscale are looking excellent, and the coverage of the BT 2020 color space is better than expected.

I'm also impressed with the backlight control, black levels, peak brightness, and contrast ratio on this TV. These factors all point to a well-designed panel that should provide great viewing experiences for most users. Almost being good enough for me isn't good enough for you, folks, so I'll be holding off until I can give you my full review.

But before I do, I want to tease some upcoming news that's going to change things around here. It's something big, and I'm excited to share it with you all soon. For now, let's just say that it will impact the way we approach TV reviews in the future.

Finally, if you have any feedback on this review or any suggestions for how I can improve my content, please don't hesitate to leave a comment below. I know you'll give me your honest opinions, even if I don't ask for them, and that's exactly what matters. Don't forget to like and subscribe, as always, and I'll see you in the next video.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enall right everybody back at you with another exciting TV review today we're going to be checking out the Hisense u8k which is perfect because we just what for Pete's sake I'll be right back as I was saying very excited to be reviewing the Hisense u8k yeah that other one was the Hisense u7k which I know a lot of folks want to see me review and we'll get to it but priorities we got to do the u8k first because oh I'm out of breath uh we just got done doing the TCL qm8 for which this TV is a direct competitor oddly enough the u7k has a taller narrower and much lighter box so I'm really interested to see what's in this so I'm going to talk a little bit about this TV as I unbox it and then we'll get it set up and uh I'll take a few days to evaluate it and come back and give you the full review for now let's get that unboxing part done actually before I start cutting tape I want to point out to some of the stuff that's printed on the box itself not that don't worry about that just kidding all due respect to David katzmeyer but seriously Hisense really I mean we can do better call me now actually what I wanted to point out on the on the box is this peak brightness 1500 rating which is supposed to say can hit up to 1500 nits first of all printing that right on the box is an interesting move kind of a piece of flex on Hisense part but also this is going to be a very conservative number I expect this TV to get much brighter than that interesting move on Hisense part that kind of a transparency just putting it right out there and then exceeding people's expectations that they themselves are setting whatever let's open this box there we go this is what we were looking for yeah yeah don't really need the manual but definitely need the remote and most importantly the screws and power cable that's also important and she goes carefully nice typical Hisense TV we have two different uh places to place the feet we can go on the exterior for a wider stance or more toward the center for a slightly narrower stance will go wide as we normally do you know what I like these uh feet they are a lot more substantial than I'm used to getting from Hisense and uh that is a very welcome change I also like that there's not really a left and a right anymore they just changed the shape of the legs so you can use either one on either side and there's only one way they can go in okay we're up back of the TV shot here uh no obvious signs as to why this felt heavier in the Box than the U7 uh but you know I won't know until we open the U7 I will say it does have a subwoofer doubt that's the source of the extra weight but uh at least high sense is trying to beef up the audio with their televisions just like TCL is whereas I feel like other manufacturers have kind of given up on the TV sound not sure what these flared ports are for I'll find out and cover that in the full review portion coming up here the only other thing worth mentioning back here is that the TV does come with two HDMI 2.1 ports the TB is capable of 4K 144 Hertz with vrr two ports support that one of which is the arc Port just saying and then there's a couple of 4k60 ports on here as well I was just commenting that I wish that there was a tab on this TV for pulling off the film like the TCL and there actually is one the trick though is that there's extra tape on the top and the bottom and I'm not sure if it's going to come off when I try and remove this yeah that's that's not going to work great so foreign how's that sound that sound nice I feel like TV unboxing ASMR is like the highest form of ASMR do you agree if you do leave this video a like manufacturers get paid um money to feature streaming services on there so it's common to find Netflix YouTube but after Netflix and YouTube it's kind of a battle to whoever's gonna spend the money to get the placement so Disney plus uh HBO Max excuse me Max um they're you know they're going to battle that out and uh spend the money to get the placement on the remote which is like fine for the brand but terrible for us because it's just more keys that let's be honest how useful is it to have a key for crackle I don't know if you love crackle don't send hate mail I'm just saying like do we need crackle on the remote okay funny thing I I just went on that rant without actually looking at the remote I just saw I had six hotkeys one of them is apps it's yelling at you too apps a button for apps I guess that's how you get to the apps but you know how else you get to the apps you press the home key who knows I hope this thing glows in the dark we are up and running and if you watch my TV reviews then you probably already know that I really prefer Google TV as a smart TV operating system most of the setup happens on the Google home app on your phone now that we're into the picture menu I noticed that we need to go into General in order to change our picture mode which are definitely going to want to do if you purchase this TV because it's going to ship in the energy saving mode energy saving is great for saving energy and the planet however it also caps the maximum brightness of your TV so if you want to get the full performance from your TV at least switch it out of energy saving mode in terms of my recommended picture preset uh you can choose either filmmaker mode theater day or theater night also disables motion smoothing which is something I like and because it does that I'm actually going to select theater let's do theater day um which is very bright I'm going to change my mind we're going with theater night theater night next thing I want to do is make sure the automatic light sensor is not turned on and it's not that's great I noticed with the TCL qm8 the light sensor was turned on if it is turned on it's going to automatically adjust the brightness and since I want control for my review I need to make sure that's turned off now that takes care of our picture preset let's just go ahead and take a look in the brightness setting we noticed that local dimming is set to high which is what we want at least for now to get started uh BT 1886 gamma is what you expect for SDR Dynamic tone mapping would be grayed out because we're not in HDR um looks like there's a dark detail setting that we can play around with later but that looks great uh in terms of color what I expect is it to be on a warm color settings and it is now there are two here there's warm one and warm too I'll play around with this for the review to see which one I find to be the most accurate but for now we'll stick with the default settings since that's what you're gonna get if you select this picture mode at home under Clarity it looks like we have some pretty basic noise reduction going on here but motion enhancement is set to standard we will try Custom and film to see if we can find a nice balance between motion smoothing and full-on soap opera effect but for now I'm turning it off to see how the TV handles motion and under calibration settings this is where I'm going to go in and tune the white balance and some of the color settings once I get to calibrating this TV and I'm back but there have been developments obviously I'd hope to be sitting here delivering the full review on this TV as you just saw from the unboxing portion but I'm afraid that's going to have to wait for a bit and I'm sorry about that there are a couple of weird things happening with this particular u8k review unit that I'll be describing shortly but first I wanted to talk about why I'm pressing forward with this video the second reason is I feel like you all show up to watch these videos and I think it's important that I show up with videos for you to watch this has always been more than just a review channel it's about the experiences with tech that we share together the third reason is that I've been teasing and promoting this review and promised it would come soon and if I'm not going to come through on those promises then I owe you an explanation so consider this a little inside look at what it's like to review TVs along with what I think is going to be a pretty encouraging preview of the Hisense u8k review that is coming very soon as many of you know my TV reviews are a combination of objective measurements and subjective analysis and that's just the picture performance aspect I like to go beyond picture performance and talk about the experience of owning a TV as well as I launched into measuring this TV I got some very encouraging results which I'll share with you in a moment but along the way I ran into two anomalies and I used that word anomaly very intentionally here I am confident that the issues I've run into here are not inherent to the u8k TV because I've brought them up with Hisense and they are not experiencing this with any of the TVs they have on hand to test that being the case it is unlikely that these issues I'm seeing will present themselves on any of the retail TVs that go on sale whenever Hisense finally releases the u8k here which brings up an important point this is something some of us reviewers run into when we get super early access to TVs we're going to run into stuff that nobody else is going to run into in fact our early the reporting often results in Brands fixing any problems that exist before the products land in your hands or your home so with all of that in mind here's what I ran into there's two things one is that the blue color on this TV and by extension Cyan are showing errors that are way out of line with the rest of the color performance on this TV this is clearly an anomaly because if the TV just had poor color in general it would show up across the entire color gamut but actually as you can see here all the other colors are measuring really well the white point and the grayscale too measuring super well and I brought this up to Hisense and they can't replicate it so I'm confident this is an anomaly and not a widespread issue with the TV itself the other weird thing I've run into and I've never seen this before is that filmmaker mode HDR isn't working properly I know this because every other HDR picture mode works great I can put the TV into HDR I can check that in the info menu here plus we get a little will pop up as well we're in HDR with a 10-bit signal 4K resolution 24 FPS for right now and filmmaker modes brightness is capping at about 600 nits while the other HDR modes are measuring as I expected at around 2200 nits you can see that right here and this is something I want to point out now and I'll do so in the full review too this brightness performance exceeds hisense's own claims by a good amount the box says 1500 nits and this has been an ongoing Trend with Hisense their TVs outperform their own claims pretty consistently but back to this filmmaker mode issue it points to a problem with this specific TV sample and even though just about everything else on this TV looks exactly as I expected and by the way looks and sounds very very good the fact that there are these issues means that I can't trust with 100 certainty that I'm experiencing either the best This TV has to offer nor what you would experience at home and that just doesn't work for me I can't go forward with a review unless I'm totally confident in my own work for that reason I'm going to let Hisense send me a different TV and I'll send this one back to them so they can see what's going on in the end everyone is going to be the better for it when I get that replacement TV which I imagine is going to show up pretty quickly then I'll be able to make short work of the review after confirming that those two anomalies aren't present because folks here's the preview part this TV is doing some great things from the white balance and grayscale I mentioned earlier to better coverage of the BT 2020 color space than I expected to some impressive backlight control black levels Peak brightness contrast all of those factors are looking really good right now I almost feel like I could look past those two things and offer a qualified review of this TV but almost is not good enough for me and more importantly almost isn't good enough for you y'all have shown me way too much love over the past 10 years for me not to give you my best so for you for Hisense for everyone I'm going to hold off and bring you my full u8k review soon as soon as I can and then shortly after that I'm going to put the 65-inch u8k against a 65 inch TCL qm8 and we're going to see exactly how that plays out honestly that's the TV comparison I'm personally looking forward to doing the most and hey while we're here I just want to tease something else I have some very exciting and for me personally very big news that I'm going to be sharing soon it's going to change a lot about what's happening on this channel so stay tuned for that and if you're not already subscribed go ahead and do that now so you don't miss out okay okay see you all soon and as always much love to you all thank you so much for your support it means the world to me I'll see you soon thanks as always for watching everyone I would love your feedback on this video and I know you're going to give it to me even if I don't ask for it but here's me asking so hit me up in the comments section don't forget to like And subscribe like I said I'll see you on the next one until then here's two other videos I think you might like foreignall right everybody back at you with another exciting TV review today we're going to be checking out the Hisense u8k which is perfect because we just what for Pete's sake I'll be right back as I was saying very excited to be reviewing the Hisense u8k yeah that other one was the Hisense u7k which I know a lot of folks want to see me review and we'll get to it but priorities we got to do the u8k first because oh I'm out of breath uh we just got done doing the TCL qm8 for which this TV is a direct competitor oddly enough the u7k has a taller narrower and much lighter box so I'm really interested to see what's in this so I'm going to talk a little bit about this TV as I unbox it and then we'll get it set up and uh I'll take a few days to evaluate it and come back and give you the full review for now let's get that unboxing part done actually before I start cutting tape I want to point out to some of the stuff that's printed on the box itself not that don't worry about that just kidding all due respect to David katzmeyer but seriously Hisense really I mean we can do better call me now actually what I wanted to point out on the on the box is this peak brightness 1500 rating which is supposed to say can hit up to 1500 nits first of all printing that right on the box is an interesting move kind of a piece of flex on Hisense part but also this is going to be a very conservative number I expect this TV to get much brighter than that interesting move on Hisense part that kind of a transparency just putting it right out there and then exceeding people's expectations that they themselves are setting whatever let's open this box there we go this is what we were looking for yeah yeah don't really need the manual but definitely need the remote and most importantly the screws and power cable that's also important and she goes carefully nice typical Hisense TV we have two different uh places to place the feet we can go on the exterior for a wider stance or more toward the center for a slightly narrower stance will go wide as we normally do you know what I like these uh feet they are a lot more substantial than I'm used to getting from Hisense and uh that is a very welcome change I also like that there's not really a left and a right anymore they just changed the shape of the legs so you can use either one on either side and there's only one way they can go in okay we're up back of the TV shot here uh no obvious signs as to why this felt heavier in the Box than the U7 uh but you know I won't know until we open the U7 I will say it does have a subwoofer doubt that's the source of the extra weight but uh at least high sense is trying to beef up the audio with their televisions just like TCL is whereas I feel like other manufacturers have kind of given up on the TV sound not sure what these flared ports are for I'll find out and cover that in the full review portion coming up here the only other thing worth mentioning back here is that the TV does come with two HDMI 2.1 ports the TB is capable of 4K 144 Hertz with vrr two ports support that one of which is the arc Port just saying and then there's a couple of 4k60 ports on here as well I was just commenting that I wish that there was a tab on this TV for pulling off the film like the TCL and there actually is one the trick though is that there's extra tape on the top and the bottom and I'm not sure if it's going to come off when I try and remove this yeah that's that's not going to work great so foreign how's that sound that sound nice I feel like TV unboxing ASMR is like the highest form of ASMR do you agree if you do leave this video a like manufacturers get paid um money to feature streaming services on there so it's common to find Netflix YouTube but after Netflix and YouTube it's kind of a battle to whoever's gonna spend the money to get the placement so Disney plus uh HBO Max excuse me Max um they're you know they're going to battle that out and uh spend the money to get the placement on the remote which is like fine for the brand but terrible for us because it's just more keys that let's be honest how useful is it to have a key for crackle I don't know if you love crackle don't send hate mail I'm just saying like do we need crackle on the remote okay funny thing I I just went on that rant without actually looking at the remote I just saw I had six hotkeys one of them is apps it's yelling at you too apps a button for apps I guess that's how you get to the apps but you know how else you get to the apps you press the home key who knows I hope this thing glows in the dark we are up and running and if you watch my TV reviews then you probably already know that I really prefer Google TV as a smart TV operating system most of the setup happens on the Google home app on your phone now that we're into the picture menu I noticed that we need to go into General in order to change our picture mode which are definitely going to want to do if you purchase this TV because it's going to ship in the energy saving mode energy saving is great for saving energy and the planet however it also caps the maximum brightness of your TV so if you want to get the full performance from your TV at least switch it out of energy saving mode in terms of my recommended picture preset uh you can choose either filmmaker mode theater day or theater night also disables motion smoothing which is something I like and because it does that I'm actually going to select theater let's do theater day um which is very bright I'm going to change my mind we're going with theater night theater night next thing I want to do is make sure the automatic light sensor is not turned on and it's not that's great I noticed with the TCL qm8 the light sensor was turned on if it is turned on it's going to automatically adjust the brightness and since I want control for my review I need to make sure that's turned off now that takes care of our picture preset let's just go ahead and take a look in the brightness setting we noticed that local dimming is set to high which is what we want at least for now to get started uh BT 1886 gamma is what you expect for SDR Dynamic tone mapping would be grayed out because we're not in HDR um looks like there's a dark detail setting that we can play around with later but that looks great uh in terms of color what I expect is it to be on a warm color settings and it is now there are two here there's warm one and warm too I'll play around with this for the review to see which one I find to be the most accurate but for now we'll stick with the default settings since that's what you're gonna get if you select this picture mode at home under Clarity it looks like we have some pretty basic noise reduction going on here but motion enhancement is set to standard we will try Custom and film to see if we can find a nice balance between motion smoothing and full-on soap opera effect but for now I'm turning it off to see how the TV handles motion and under calibration settings this is where I'm going to go in and tune the white balance and some of the color settings once I get to calibrating this TV and I'm back but there have been developments obviously I'd hope to be sitting here delivering the full review on this TV as you just saw from the unboxing portion but I'm afraid that's going to have to wait for a bit and I'm sorry about that there are a couple of weird things happening with this particular u8k review unit that I'll be describing shortly but first I wanted to talk about why I'm pressing forward with this video the second reason is I feel like you all show up to watch these videos and I think it's important that I show up with videos for you to watch this has always been more than just a review channel it's about the experiences with tech that we share together the third reason is that I've been teasing and promoting this review and promised it would come soon and if I'm not going to come through on those promises then I owe you an explanation so consider this a little inside look at what it's like to review TVs along with what I think is going to be a pretty encouraging preview of the Hisense u8k review that is coming very soon as many of you know my TV reviews are a combination of objective measurements and subjective analysis and that's just the picture performance aspect I like to go beyond picture performance and talk about the experience of owning a TV as well as I launched into measuring this TV I got some very encouraging results which I'll share with you in a moment but along the way I ran into two anomalies and I used that word anomaly very intentionally here I am confident that the issues I've run into here are not inherent to the u8k TV because I've brought them up with Hisense and they are not experiencing this with any of the TVs they have on hand to test that being the case it is unlikely that these issues I'm seeing will present themselves on any of the retail TVs that go on sale whenever Hisense finally releases the u8k here which brings up an important point this is something some of us reviewers run into when we get super early access to TVs we're going to run into stuff that nobody else is going to run into in fact our early the reporting often results in Brands fixing any problems that exist before the products land in your hands or your home so with all of that in mind here's what I ran into there's two things one is that the blue color on this TV and by extension Cyan are showing errors that are way out of line with the rest of the color performance on this TV this is clearly an anomaly because if the TV just had poor color in general it would show up across the entire color gamut but actually as you can see here all the other colors are measuring really well the white point and the grayscale too measuring super well and I brought this up to Hisense and they can't replicate it so I'm confident this is an anomaly and not a widespread issue with the TV itself the other weird thing I've run into and I've never seen this before is that filmmaker mode HDR isn't working properly I know this because every other HDR picture mode works great I can put the TV into HDR I can check that in the info menu here plus we get a little will pop up as well we're in HDR with a 10-bit signal 4K resolution 24 FPS for right now and filmmaker modes brightness is capping at about 600 nits while the other HDR modes are measuring as I expected at around 2200 nits you can see that right here and this is something I want to point out now and I'll do so in the full review too this brightness performance exceeds hisense's own claims by a good amount the box says 1500 nits and this has been an ongoing Trend with Hisense their TVs outperform their own claims pretty consistently but back to this filmmaker mode issue it points to a problem with this specific TV sample and even though just about everything else on this TV looks exactly as I expected and by the way looks and sounds very very good the fact that there are these issues means that I can't trust with 100 certainty that I'm experiencing either the best This TV has to offer nor what you would experience at home and that just doesn't work for me I can't go forward with a review unless I'm totally confident in my own work for that reason I'm going to let Hisense send me a different TV and I'll send this one back to them so they can see what's going on in the end everyone is going to be the better for it when I get that replacement TV which I imagine is going to show up pretty quickly then I'll be able to make short work of the review after confirming that those two anomalies aren't present because folks here's the preview part this TV is doing some great things from the white balance and grayscale I mentioned earlier to better coverage of the BT 2020 color space than I expected to some impressive backlight control black levels Peak brightness contrast all of those factors are looking really good right now I almost feel like I could look past those two things and offer a qualified review of this TV but almost is not good enough for me and more importantly almost isn't good enough for you y'all have shown me way too much love over the past 10 years for me not to give you my best so for you for Hisense for everyone I'm going to hold off and bring you my full u8k review soon as soon as I can and then shortly after that I'm going to put the 65-inch u8k against a 65 inch TCL qm8 and we're going to see exactly how that plays out honestly that's the TV comparison I'm personally looking forward to doing the most and hey while we're here I just want to tease something else I have some very exciting and for me personally very big news that I'm going to be sharing soon it's going to change a lot about what's happening on this channel so stay tuned for that and if you're not already subscribed go ahead and do that now so you don't miss out okay okay see you all soon and as always much love to you all thank you so much for your support it means the world to me I'll see you soon thanks as always for watching everyone I would love your feedback on this video and I know you're going to give it to me even if I don't ask for it but here's me asking so hit me up in the comments section don't forget to like And subscribe like I said I'll see you on the next one until then here's two other videos I think you might like foreign\n"