The Hisense U8K TV: A Marvelous Display with Excellent Price to Performance Ratio

I am excited to share my experience with the Hisense U8K TV, which has exceeded my expectations in every way. As I mentioned before, I was prepared for a great performance from this TV after having used the U8H model, but I must say that the U8K takes it to the next level. The U8K performs as I expected it to, and it's hard not to be impressed with its picture quality.

One of the key areas where the U8K shines is in its backlight control. This TV has very well-controlled black levels, which make a huge difference in the overall viewing experience. The backlight is also much more subtle and less obtrusive than I've seen on other TVs. The result is a truly immersive viewing experience with deep blacks and a wider range of colors.

The U8K also features a VA panel across all sizes of the TV, which provides very similar performance no matter which size you choose. This is great news for buyers who want to future-proof their investment, as they can get a TV that will perform consistently across different screen sizes.

Another aspect of the U8K's performance that I was excited to see was its tone mapping capabilities. Tone mapping refers to how well a TV maps the brightness spectrum from black all the way to the brightest it can get. This is critical for maintaining detail in both shadows and highlights, as poor tone mapping can result in lost details and a loss of clarity.

I've put the U8K through its paces with various HDR source materials, including some 4K Blu-rays mastered at 4000 nits, which is an extremely high level of brightness. The results are consistently impressive, with the TV handling both bright highlights and deep shadows with ease. While I do have to admit that there may be a few exceptions out there – specifically, 4K Blu-rays mastered at above 4000 nits – the U8K performs exceptionally well across most HDR content.

The fact that the U8K represents a rare exception is not because it's lacking in some way, but rather because true HDR content mastered at above 4000 nits is relatively rare. Most HDR sources are mastered at much lower levels, around 1000 nits, and as such, showing what a TV does with material above 4000 nits may not be all that relevant.

For most viewers, this means that the U8K performs wonderfully across a vast range of HDR content, without any noticeable compromises in terms of picture quality. The only reason I might have expected even better performance from the U8K is because I knew what the U8H model could do – and as it turns out, that was more than sufficient to meet my expectations.

In short, if you're in the market for a new TV, I would definitely shortlist the Hisense U8K. While there are other great options available, I'm confident that this TV offers an exceptional price-to-performance ratio that makes it hard to beat. And while I wouldn't recommend upgrading from your existing U8H model – unless you're itching for the latest and greatest technology – if you do decide to make a move, I think you'll be thoroughly impressed with what you get.

The Hisense U8K TV is an excellent choice for anyone looking for a great picture quality without breaking the bank.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhen last we left the Hisense u8k it was doing some weird stuff weird enough that I was pretty sure I had a slightly faulty unit well I got a replacement fully tested it and now I have the full scoop on this highly anticipated TV welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Dennison coming at you in the pink Polo once again sporting that golf dad drip you heard what what's wrong I can't I can't do that this just in I've been informed I must stay away from gen Z terms sorry kids okay why are we here ah yes the Hisense u8k review at long last for those who missed this video right here when last we saw the Hisense u8k it was doing almost everything right but there were some anomalies I was sure were indicative of a faulty sample which frankly happens more often than you'd think a byproduct of getting the first units in the wild I'm afraid but Hisense quickly sent a replacement and I've had a chance to thoroughly test this unit and I'm prepared with a full review so sit back relax get comfortable let's see what's up with the Hisense u8k the first thing I want to clarify and honestly I'm super embarrassed this didn't even occur to me I mean how did I miss this normally it would have been the first thought I had but the mod number u8k it does not mean this is an 8K TV K is just the next acceptable letter in the alphabet last year we had the u8h we skipped I and J for some reason and now we've landed on the u8k just a model number has nothing to do with resolution no indeed the u8k is a 4K HDR u-led TV u-led is just hisense's way of differentiating itself this TV does use quantum dots and like all of hisense's TVs from the U6 series up it also has mini LED backlights could call it a qled but Hisense likes ulit so there you go now I know a lot of you want me to compare this TV to the TCL qm8 or maybe even the TCL Q7 as I review it I will be doing a detailed comparison in a future video you have my word on that the 65-inch qm8 arrives here tomorrow as a matter of fact so I'll be jumping right on it I promise but here I want to focus on what the u8k does well and what it maybe doesn't do super well all on its own merits we establish all of that and then we get to the comparison sound good hope so because that's what's happening right now actually what's happening right now this very instant is any guesses out there yell it in the comment section and smash this video with a like if you know what I'm about to say numbers for Knit nerds you know what time it is for those of you new to this Channel first off welcome we like to have fun around here but also I like to get serious and dig into some of the deeper measurement data I gather on the TVs I review so we're going to be talking about knits and color gamut and stuff for a moment if that sounds like a foreign language that is perfectly okay you are welcome to skip this section using the time code below however you might want to stick around because I'll try to explain what I'm talking about as I do it and hey might learn something that helps you understand TV tech and pick the right new TV for you so let's start with Peak brightness because that seems like everyone's favorite metric these days good news there as expected the Hisense uak offers Peak brightness of right around 2 000 nits Hisense only promises 1500 nits on the box and the u8k is yet another Hisense TV exceeding expectations we've seen this before the u8h did it as did the u7h and some of the models before them even 2000 nits is excellent considering the price of the TV you can spend more with some competitors and not get as bright a TV now that 2000 nits is great for HDR highlights as I'll discuss shortly this TV does a great job presenting HDR but it also means this TV can get very bright for SDR content too it offers full screen white brightness of about 750 to 800 nits so it's average Picture level or APL for short is plenty sufficient for say viewing Sports in a bright room during the middle of the day there's another reason to really appreciate this TV especially for the price now let's move on to grayscale and color accuracy grayscale is important because it tells us how accurate the color temperature of the TV will be we want the TV to represent a d65 white point because that's what Hollywood has decided is most desirable and thus they grade movies to look correct when a TV's white point is at d65. here the Hisense u8k tested ridiculously well like suspiciously well Delta errors were under one which is as good as you could hope to get with a professional calibration let alone something you expect coming out of the box so this led me to think maybe I have a golden sample on my hands that's a TV which has been hand-picked to be the best example of the technology and thus not necessarily a perfect representation of what you'd get from a TV that you pick up at the store but as I tested color accuracy I backed off the idea that this may be a so-called golden sample or that if it is a golden sample there is an issue that I noted in my previous review unit that is carrying over just a bit with this TV now if you saw my previous u8k video you'll know that one of the issues that had me thinking the TV might be faulty in some way was that the blue cyan and to a slightly lesser extent green colors were coming up as far less accurate than the other colors in the test the good news here is that this TV is testing much better however as you can see here the blue and Cyan are still showing up as being much less accurate than all the other colors now I haven't gotten to the bottom of why this is I had a couple of guesses though and one of them was that perhaps the color temperature setting was just not warm enough in the filmmaker mode picture preset which by the way the filmmaker mode on this unit is doing just fine in terms of brightness that was the other concern I had with the previous unit anyway the color tep setting in filmmaker mode by default on this set was warm one which I found odd because I seem to remember warm 2 being the more accurate of the two in previous reviews so for grins I switched to warm 2 and retested the TV's grayscale and color and holy cow the white balance on this TV was just way way out of whack you can see it right here I think it is super strange that warm one would offer among the most accurate out of Box readings I've ever seen while worm 2 would be so wildly out of whack I guess that's yet another thing to get to the bottom them up and speak to In the comparison video that I have planned for you all anyway I am seeing some blue and cyan color errors from filmmaker mode theater day and theater night picture presets at least ones I can measure but as I'll discuss in a moment I do not see this bear out so much when watching normal content nothing looks wrong when I'm just watching TV or movies furthermore when I switch to HDR the HDR color Checker results are all excellent so big shrug Emoji for me but again when watching HDR content colors look fantastic in terms of motion resolution the u8k does pretty well it doesn't eliminate judder quite so smoothly as say a Sony TV of about the same price or more it's on par with a TCL for example but I do see better motion resolution for much more expensive Samsung and Sony TVs and that's honestly not a huge surprise however upscaling and specifically color gradient handling on this TV is impressive I watched a lot of broadcast TV and some low bit depth streaming content and while this TV doesn't eliminate color banding entirely it does a better job than some other TVs in its price class including a certain TCL model and that counts for a lot in my book because between streaming content especially on YouTube because of YouTube compression and then also cable and satellite content the Hisense u8k is going to make those compressed images just look better and the larger the screen size the more important that's going to be a lot of people watch that kind of content and this TV is going to make it look really good one final thing to share in the knit nerds Department especially For You Gamers out there my input lag tester has gone kaput so I'm sorry to report that I can't offer you an input lag measurement in terms of milliseconds but I haven't been able to detect any meaningful input lag in game mode and so long as the u8k isn't any worse than the u8h and I don't think it is that number is probably somewhere in the 15 millisecond region for 4K 60 and half that at about 7.5 milliseconds for 4K 120 hertz content I reckon perhaps just slightly lower for 144 Hertz content which this TV does support if you intend to run a gaming PC on it okay so if you've just skipped the numbers for Knit nerd section and are rejoining us here are the key takeaways the u8k has excellent brightness for HDR and SDR and it's outstanding for a bright room environment especially for bright programming like sports the color looks bright and Vivid and is very accurate especially in HDR I suggest using the filmmaker mode as your picture preset for SDR and HDR and if you want just bump the brightness up in the SDR modes if you need to but honestly I don't think you will it's kind of bright right out of the box the TV does a great job upscaling and cleaning up streaming content tent and cable satellite TV better than similarly priced competition and has solid motion resolution along with what I suspect is very low input lag for gaming it does support up to 4K 144 Hertz if you connect a gaming PC but most folks will want to game at 4K 60 or maybe 4K 120 or engage variable refresh rate on their console which this TV also supports as for black levels and backlight performance the Hisense u8k is definitely in the upper tiers here it does much better than more expensive TVs from Sony and a little better than some pricey TVs from Samsung in terms of preventing too much halo around bright objects on a dark background it also avoids crushing black so you don't lose Shadow detail there's only one other non-oled TV I can think of that is significantly better in the black levels Department in terms of backlight control and that's the tclq M8 which probably comes as no surprise eyes because that TV is something of a unicorn in the backlight Control Department the u8k's off-angle performance will show some loss in color saturation the black levels take a bit of a hit and the backlight is more visible although this is true of just about every TV that has a VA panel but this is at extreme angles to the TV so if you're in the seat on the far end of a sectional couch sitting such that you can almost see the back of the TV well that's not going to be the best seat in the house but that is true of just about any LCD based TV speaking of panel types I am currently trying to confirm whether a VA panel is used across all sizes of the uak and will provide those details in a pinned comment on this video once I have official confirmation but for now I think it's safe to say that you will get very similar performance no matter which size of this TV you buy foreign aspect of the u8 case performance that is part of an increasing coverage on the subject of tone mapping for those unfamiliar with the concept tone mapping has to do with how a TV Maps the brightness Spectrum from black all the way to the brightest it can get so that it can show all the details that are available in the source material be that in the shadows or the bright highlight areas this scene on the Spears and munzel disc is super popular for determining how a TV does at maintaining detail in the brightest areas of a picture if a TV Clips the brightest areas you won't see the trees in the background of this shot of these horses you'll just see a blob of white let me be super clear here the u8 case tone mapping is spot on for 99.3 percent of all the HDR Source material you could throw at it there are a handful of 4K Blu-rays that are mastered at 4 knits and with those discs you may see that some super bright highlight detail is lost if you're even the sort of person who picks up on that kind of thing most of you out there don't I'm not trying to insult you I just mean that most folks wouldn't know if something was missing or not because the opportunity to notice such things are very few and very far between most HDR content is mastered at 1 000 nits with very very few exceptions and the uak represents that material exceptionally well there is no HDR Source material that is mastered higher than 4000 nits that isn't on just a test disk and there isn't going to be any time before you replace this TV so to me showing what a TV does with material mastered at above 4000 nits it's not helpful information you're not going to get any of that from Netflix or Hulu or Disney Plus or Max or most of the Blu-rays that you have at home that's just my hot take I'll get off my soapbox now and y'all can just so frankly this TV review was pretty easy the Hisense u8k performs as I expected it to which is to say it's a marvelous TV especially for its price I don't think there is a better price to Performance ratio on the market right now I could be proven wrong in time but for now this TV Nails the price to Performance ratio dollar per dollar this uak offers more than just about anything else for those who want the best picture they can get for their money the only reason I expected as much out of the u8k as I did is because I know what the u8h did so I was prepared for it and I definitely was not disappointed now if you have a u8h and you're wondering if you should upgrade less than a year after getting your TV I mean I wouldn't run out and replace your u8h I think there are some refinements in the u8k here but the u8h is still an awesome TV if you're watching this with your significant other and I just thwarted your upgrade plans I I apologize but hey it's your money and if you like having the latest and greatest u8h is so good you should be able to get a good price on a private sale and you can pay a little upgrade fee to get this version the u8k folks I would definitely shortlist this TV it is outstanding and if you buy it I'm pretty sure you'll be thrilled with your decision thanks as always for watching everyone who's excited to see me put the u8k against the TCL q a let me know down in the comments don't forget to like And subscribe see you on the next video and until then here's two other videos I think you might like thank youwhen last we left the Hisense u8k it was doing some weird stuff weird enough that I was pretty sure I had a slightly faulty unit well I got a replacement fully tested it and now I have the full scoop on this highly anticipated TV welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Dennison coming at you in the pink Polo once again sporting that golf dad drip you heard what what's wrong I can't I can't do that this just in I've been informed I must stay away from gen Z terms sorry kids okay why are we here ah yes the Hisense u8k review at long last for those who missed this video right here when last we saw the Hisense u8k it was doing almost everything right but there were some anomalies I was sure were indicative of a faulty sample which frankly happens more often than you'd think a byproduct of getting the first units in the wild I'm afraid but Hisense quickly sent a replacement and I've had a chance to thoroughly test this unit and I'm prepared with a full review so sit back relax get comfortable let's see what's up with the Hisense u8k the first thing I want to clarify and honestly I'm super embarrassed this didn't even occur to me I mean how did I miss this normally it would have been the first thought I had but the mod number u8k it does not mean this is an 8K TV K is just the next acceptable letter in the alphabet last year we had the u8h we skipped I and J for some reason and now we've landed on the u8k just a model number has nothing to do with resolution no indeed the u8k is a 4K HDR u-led TV u-led is just hisense's way of differentiating itself this TV does use quantum dots and like all of hisense's TVs from the U6 series up it also has mini LED backlights could call it a qled but Hisense likes ulit so there you go now I know a lot of you want me to compare this TV to the TCL qm8 or maybe even the TCL Q7 as I review it I will be doing a detailed comparison in a future video you have my word on that the 65-inch qm8 arrives here tomorrow as a matter of fact so I'll be jumping right on it I promise but here I want to focus on what the u8k does well and what it maybe doesn't do super well all on its own merits we establish all of that and then we get to the comparison sound good hope so because that's what's happening right now actually what's happening right now this very instant is any guesses out there yell it in the comment section and smash this video with a like if you know what I'm about to say numbers for Knit nerds you know what time it is for those of you new to this Channel first off welcome we like to have fun around here but also I like to get serious and dig into some of the deeper measurement data I gather on the TVs I review so we're going to be talking about knits and color gamut and stuff for a moment if that sounds like a foreign language that is perfectly okay you are welcome to skip this section using the time code below however you might want to stick around because I'll try to explain what I'm talking about as I do it and hey might learn something that helps you understand TV tech and pick the right new TV for you so let's start with Peak brightness because that seems like everyone's favorite metric these days good news there as expected the Hisense uak offers Peak brightness of right around 2 000 nits Hisense only promises 1500 nits on the box and the u8k is yet another Hisense TV exceeding expectations we've seen this before the u8h did it as did the u7h and some of the models before them even 2000 nits is excellent considering the price of the TV you can spend more with some competitors and not get as bright a TV now that 2000 nits is great for HDR highlights as I'll discuss shortly this TV does a great job presenting HDR but it also means this TV can get very bright for SDR content too it offers full screen white brightness of about 750 to 800 nits so it's average Picture level or APL for short is plenty sufficient for say viewing Sports in a bright room during the middle of the day there's another reason to really appreciate this TV especially for the price now let's move on to grayscale and color accuracy grayscale is important because it tells us how accurate the color temperature of the TV will be we want the TV to represent a d65 white point because that's what Hollywood has decided is most desirable and thus they grade movies to look correct when a TV's white point is at d65. here the Hisense u8k tested ridiculously well like suspiciously well Delta errors were under one which is as good as you could hope to get with a professional calibration let alone something you expect coming out of the box so this led me to think maybe I have a golden sample on my hands that's a TV which has been hand-picked to be the best example of the technology and thus not necessarily a perfect representation of what you'd get from a TV that you pick up at the store but as I tested color accuracy I backed off the idea that this may be a so-called golden sample or that if it is a golden sample there is an issue that I noted in my previous review unit that is carrying over just a bit with this TV now if you saw my previous u8k video you'll know that one of the issues that had me thinking the TV might be faulty in some way was that the blue cyan and to a slightly lesser extent green colors were coming up as far less accurate than the other colors in the test the good news here is that this TV is testing much better however as you can see here the blue and Cyan are still showing up as being much less accurate than all the other colors now I haven't gotten to the bottom of why this is I had a couple of guesses though and one of them was that perhaps the color temperature setting was just not warm enough in the filmmaker mode picture preset which by the way the filmmaker mode on this unit is doing just fine in terms of brightness that was the other concern I had with the previous unit anyway the color tep setting in filmmaker mode by default on this set was warm one which I found odd because I seem to remember warm 2 being the more accurate of the two in previous reviews so for grins I switched to warm 2 and retested the TV's grayscale and color and holy cow the white balance on this TV was just way way out of whack you can see it right here I think it is super strange that warm one would offer among the most accurate out of Box readings I've ever seen while worm 2 would be so wildly out of whack I guess that's yet another thing to get to the bottom them up and speak to In the comparison video that I have planned for you all anyway I am seeing some blue and cyan color errors from filmmaker mode theater day and theater night picture presets at least ones I can measure but as I'll discuss in a moment I do not see this bear out so much when watching normal content nothing looks wrong when I'm just watching TV or movies furthermore when I switch to HDR the HDR color Checker results are all excellent so big shrug Emoji for me but again when watching HDR content colors look fantastic in terms of motion resolution the u8k does pretty well it doesn't eliminate judder quite so smoothly as say a Sony TV of about the same price or more it's on par with a TCL for example but I do see better motion resolution for much more expensive Samsung and Sony TVs and that's honestly not a huge surprise however upscaling and specifically color gradient handling on this TV is impressive I watched a lot of broadcast TV and some low bit depth streaming content and while this TV doesn't eliminate color banding entirely it does a better job than some other TVs in its price class including a certain TCL model and that counts for a lot in my book because between streaming content especially on YouTube because of YouTube compression and then also cable and satellite content the Hisense u8k is going to make those compressed images just look better and the larger the screen size the more important that's going to be a lot of people watch that kind of content and this TV is going to make it look really good one final thing to share in the knit nerds Department especially For You Gamers out there my input lag tester has gone kaput so I'm sorry to report that I can't offer you an input lag measurement in terms of milliseconds but I haven't been able to detect any meaningful input lag in game mode and so long as the u8k isn't any worse than the u8h and I don't think it is that number is probably somewhere in the 15 millisecond region for 4K 60 and half that at about 7.5 milliseconds for 4K 120 hertz content I reckon perhaps just slightly lower for 144 Hertz content which this TV does support if you intend to run a gaming PC on it okay so if you've just skipped the numbers for Knit nerd section and are rejoining us here are the key takeaways the u8k has excellent brightness for HDR and SDR and it's outstanding for a bright room environment especially for bright programming like sports the color looks bright and Vivid and is very accurate especially in HDR I suggest using the filmmaker mode as your picture preset for SDR and HDR and if you want just bump the brightness up in the SDR modes if you need to but honestly I don't think you will it's kind of bright right out of the box the TV does a great job upscaling and cleaning up streaming content tent and cable satellite TV better than similarly priced competition and has solid motion resolution along with what I suspect is very low input lag for gaming it does support up to 4K 144 Hertz if you connect a gaming PC but most folks will want to game at 4K 60 or maybe 4K 120 or engage variable refresh rate on their console which this TV also supports as for black levels and backlight performance the Hisense u8k is definitely in the upper tiers here it does much better than more expensive TVs from Sony and a little better than some pricey TVs from Samsung in terms of preventing too much halo around bright objects on a dark background it also avoids crushing black so you don't lose Shadow detail there's only one other non-oled TV I can think of that is significantly better in the black levels Department in terms of backlight control and that's the tclq M8 which probably comes as no surprise eyes because that TV is something of a unicorn in the backlight Control Department the u8k's off-angle performance will show some loss in color saturation the black levels take a bit of a hit and the backlight is more visible although this is true of just about every TV that has a VA panel but this is at extreme angles to the TV so if you're in the seat on the far end of a sectional couch sitting such that you can almost see the back of the TV well that's not going to be the best seat in the house but that is true of just about any LCD based TV speaking of panel types I am currently trying to confirm whether a VA panel is used across all sizes of the uak and will provide those details in a pinned comment on this video once I have official confirmation but for now I think it's safe to say that you will get very similar performance no matter which size of this TV you buy foreign aspect of the u8 case performance that is part of an increasing coverage on the subject of tone mapping for those unfamiliar with the concept tone mapping has to do with how a TV Maps the brightness Spectrum from black all the way to the brightest it can get so that it can show all the details that are available in the source material be that in the shadows or the bright highlight areas this scene on the Spears and munzel disc is super popular for determining how a TV does at maintaining detail in the brightest areas of a picture if a TV Clips the brightest areas you won't see the trees in the background of this shot of these horses you'll just see a blob of white let me be super clear here the u8 case tone mapping is spot on for 99.3 percent of all the HDR Source material you could throw at it there are a handful of 4K Blu-rays that are mastered at 4 knits and with those discs you may see that some super bright highlight detail is lost if you're even the sort of person who picks up on that kind of thing most of you out there don't I'm not trying to insult you I just mean that most folks wouldn't know if something was missing or not because the opportunity to notice such things are very few and very far between most HDR content is mastered at 1 000 nits with very very few exceptions and the uak represents that material exceptionally well there is no HDR Source material that is mastered higher than 4000 nits that isn't on just a test disk and there isn't going to be any time before you replace this TV so to me showing what a TV does with material mastered at above 4000 nits it's not helpful information you're not going to get any of that from Netflix or Hulu or Disney Plus or Max or most of the Blu-rays that you have at home that's just my hot take I'll get off my soapbox now and y'all can just so frankly this TV review was pretty easy the Hisense u8k performs as I expected it to which is to say it's a marvelous TV especially for its price I don't think there is a better price to Performance ratio on the market right now I could be proven wrong in time but for now this TV Nails the price to Performance ratio dollar per dollar this uak offers more than just about anything else for those who want the best picture they can get for their money the only reason I expected as much out of the u8k as I did is because I know what the u8h did so I was prepared for it and I definitely was not disappointed now if you have a u8h and you're wondering if you should upgrade less than a year after getting your TV I mean I wouldn't run out and replace your u8h I think there are some refinements in the u8k here but the u8h is still an awesome TV if you're watching this with your significant other and I just thwarted your upgrade plans I I apologize but hey it's your money and if you like having the latest and greatest u8h is so good you should be able to get a good price on a private sale and you can pay a little upgrade fee to get this version the u8k folks I would definitely shortlist this TV it is outstanding and if you buy it I'm pretty sure you'll be thrilled with your decision thanks as always for watching everyone who's excited to see me put the u8k against the TCL q a let me know down in the comments don't forget to like And subscribe see you on the next video and until then here's two other videos I think you might like thank you\n"