Hisense UR8SG  TV Review

The Hisense UR8 has fantastic peak brightness in HDR. Bright details really pop in most content, but some smaller highlight details are slightly dimmed by the TV's local dimming. Very bright scenes like outdoor shots or the odd HDR sports stream are incredibly bright as well.

The posted results are with the TV in Filmmaker Mode, which is the most accurate picture mode, with 'Dynamic Tone Mapping' (DTM) set to 'Off.' Below are additional measurements with the different DTM options. These settings barely affect the TV's peak brightness, but they do give you a brighter image overall.

Detail preferred:

• Hallway Lights: 967 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper:  676 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 401 cd/m²

Brightness preferred:

• Hallway Lights: 899 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper:  753 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 487 cd/m²

Switching to Game Mode barely impacts the TV's peak brightness in HDR, and any minor difference isn't noticeable. 

The posted results are with 'Dynamic Tone Mapping' (DTM) set to 'Off.' Below are additional measurements with the different DTM options.

Detail preferred:

• Hallway Lights: 927 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper:  630 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 420 cd/m²

Brightness preferred:

• Hallway Lights: 852 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper:  716 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 506 cd/m²

The peak brightness in SDR is fantastic. It's bright enough to overcome glare during the day. It's also bright enough to overcome bright lights during the day when watching sports or bright outdoor shots where more of the screen is bright at once.

The Hisense UR8 has a good contrast ratio. The native contrast ratio of the panel is decent, which helps to maintain somewhat deep blacks in more complex scenes where the local dimming feature can't keep up. Blacks are much deeper when local dimming does kick in, so the image doesn't look washed out.

Unfortunately, the TV's contrast is significantly worse than 2025's version of this TV, the Hisense U8QG, and it's even worse than the model below this one in Hisense's lineup, the Hisense U7SG. 

The lighting zone precision is alright. There's visible haloing around bright lights in otherwise dark scenes, which bleeds into surrounding dark areas and impacts the depth of blacks. There's also a very noticeable glow around subtitles, which is a bit distracting. The haloing isn't as bad when you're sitting directly in front of the TV, but it's still noticeable. 

Unfortunately, the TV's dimming zones do a worse job of avoiding this excess glow than 2025's Hisense U8QG, and there's even more haloing than there is on the cheaper Hisense U7SG.

The local dimming algorithms do a very good job keeping up with fast-moving transitions. There are some noticeable flickers as small highlights move between zones on a dark background, but everything is illuminated properly, with no dark edges. There's some excess haloing in fast action, but it's not too bad.

Switching to Game Mode has no noticeable impact on dark details like contrast, and the local dimming feature performs about the same.

The TV's black uniformity is very good. With local dimming disabled, blacks are uneven and the screen is cloudy. Enabling local dimming gives the TV outstanding uniformity, but there's some haloing around bright lights.

The Hisense UR8 has excellent color volume in SDR. Most colors are very vibrant and punchy, but it struggles to maintain color saturation in the lightest shades. 

This test is usually performed with local dimming disabled, but that results in much lower coverage of the DCI-P3 and BT.2020 color spaces. With local dimming disabled, all RGB diodes appear to remain active simultaneously, increasing white output and reducing color saturation. Our posted results are with local dimming enabled, since that's a better representation of the TV's real-world performance. Even then, the TV washes out light yellows and greens.

The HDR color volume on this TV is fantastic. Bright colors are punchy and vibrant, and dark colors are deep and well-saturated. It doesn't cover the entirety of either HDR color space, but colors in HDR content still look great. 

Like the Hisense UR9SG, there's noticeable color crosstalk caused by the RGB backlight system, but it's actually more noticeable than it is on that TV. This is especially noticeable when colors bleed into something white on the screen.

This new backlight system makes the color volume seem better than it is when measuring it with synthetic test patterns, as the TV is able to turn off the unneeded colors, and there's no crosstalk since most color volume test patterns only use one color at a time.

We took additional measurements with a modified test pattern that's designed to better represent real content. With this modified test pattern, the DCI-P3 color space coverage drops to about 82%, and the BT.2020 coverage to about 51%.

The Hisense UR8 has terrible SDR color accuracy out of the box, and it's significantly less accurate than competing models like the Samsung R85H. The white balance is awful, with way too much red represented throughout. This contributes to an overly warm color temperature, and most colors look much warmer than intended. The gamma tracking is also slightly off throughout, and the image looks a bit too dim.

The TV is easy to calibrate, and calibration drastically improves its accuracy. The white balance is fantastic, and the color temperature is essentially perfect. The gamma is much better now, and only brighter areas of the image are darker than they should be. Overall color accuracy is very good, but blues do lean more towards teal than intended.

Check out the full list of our calibration settings.

The TV's HDR color accuracy is decent out of the box. The white balance is good overall, but there's too much red throughout most grays, which contributes to an overly warm color temperature that gives the image a bit of a red tint. Overall color accuracy is decent, but most colors are either a bit undersaturated or a bit oversaturated. 

After calibration, HDR color accuracy is outstanding. The white balance is mostly fixed, and the color temperature is now very close to the industry standard 6,500K. Overall color accuracy is fantastic, with only minor mapping errors that aren't noticeable in real content.

The Hisense UR8 has excellent PQ EOTF tracking overall. Shadows, midtones, and some highlights are just a bit dimmer than intended, but this isn't noticeable in real content. Unfortunately, blacks are noticeably raised, so they lack depth. There's no difference in tracking with content mastered at different brightness levels, but since it's bright enough to display content mastered at 600 and 1,000 nits, this doesn't matter. However, there's a rolloff near the TV's peak brightness that helps to retain detail in specular highlights in the rare content mastered at 4,000 nits.

This TV has very good low-quality content smoothing. It cleans up streaming content well, reducing macro-blocking and pixelization, and there's barely any loss of fine details.

The upscaling on this TV is excellent. Fine details in low resolution content are sharp enough to make out, with no obvious over-sharpening, and text is easy to read.

The Hisense UR8 has decent gradient handling. There's some banding in darker grays, brighter greens, and blues, but it's not too bad. 

The Hisense UR8 has excellent input lag. The max refresh rate is different at 1080p and 4k resolutions, so the difference in input lag there is normal and expected. It's low enough in all modes that games feel responsive, and there's no noticeable delay between your actions on your controller and the action on the screen.

It offers a low-latency motion interpolation feature. This helps improve the fluidity of older games that don't support frame generation natively, without adding a significant amount of latency. 

The TV supports all common resolutions up to 4k @ 180Hz on all four of its HDMI ports. It also supports up to 330Hz with 1080p signals. All supported formats also support proper chroma 4:4:4, which is essential for clear text from a PC.

The TV supports all three types of variable refresh rate (VRR) technology to reduce screen tearing. It works well with AMD sources, like an AMD GPU or any console across a wide refresh rate range, and it works with Low Framerate Compensation (LFC), ensuring your games remain nearly tear-free even when your frame rate drops very low.

The CAD at the max 4k refresh rate of 180Hz is not bad. It's a bit slow across the board, resulting in somewhat blurry motion, especially in the fast-paced games. It's also a bit inconsistent, with some transitions showing signs of over and undershoot, which causes noticeable inverse ghosting and a white trail behind dark objects.

At 120Hz, the TV's CAD is similar as it is at 180Hz, so motion is a bit blurry overall. It's slower during darker moments in games, which leads to more visible blur than there is in brighter moments.

The CAD at 60Hz is poor. Almost all motion is blurry due to the very slow transition time. 

The TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 and PS5 have to offer, like 1440p @ 120Hz and 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, HDMI Forum VRR, Dolby Vision, and FreeSync Premium Pro. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to manually switch to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

There's some noticeable stutter when watching content on this TV. It's mainly limited to slow panning shots or wide shots with light action, but it's not too bad.

Introducing low levels of motion interpolation to this TV does an alright job reducing stutter without adding a noticeable soap opera effect. The hold time of frames is reduced, but the feature is a bit inconsistent, which can lead to a slightly uneven motion cadence. 

This TV removes judder from the vast majority of content. It's not quite perfect with 25p content sent over a 60p signal, but it's not too bad.

There's no micro judder.

The Hisense UR8 has a decent response time when watching content. It struggles more in dark scenes, so dark details are a bit blurrier than the rest. 

Unfortunately, color transitions are uneven, causing noticeable intermediate colors in fast action.

The TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim its backlight, which introduces flicker that can bother people who are sensitive to it. Fortunately, it flickers at a very high frequency in all picture modes, at all brightness levels, and with local dimming enabled, so it's not visible.

The TV supports backlight strobing, more commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature is designed to improve the appearance of motion by strobing its backlight and reducing the amount of persistence blur. Unfortunately, it only flickers at 120Hz, and the image is blurry with some image duplication as the pulse timing is a bit off.

The TV's glossy coating does a mediocre job of reducing the intensity of direct, mirror-like reflections. You'll still see bright lights and windows opposite the TV, especially in darker scenes.

Ambient light has barely any impact on black levels.

The total amount of reflected light off the screen is very good. There's a very slight rainbow smear, but it's not very distracting.

Ambient light has almost no impact on perceived color saturation.

The Hisense UR8 has an inadequate viewing angle for wide seating arrangements. The image fades and washes out quickly as you move to the sides, so its image quality is a lot worse when watching TV at an angle. 

The Hisense UR8 has okay gray uniformity. There's a slight dirty screen effect in the center, which is a bit distracting when watching sports. Unfortunately, the sides of the screen are lighter than the center, and there are a few patchy spots throughout.

The Hisense UR8 uses a new RGB Mini LED panel, which is mainly designed to increase color volume. Instead of a traditional blue backlight with quantum dot color converters, it uses separate red, green, and blue LEDs to produce light.

There are high peaks on reds, blues, and greens, and there's excellent separation between them, giving the TV great color purity. Unfortunately, unlike Sony BRAVIA 9 II and Samsung R95H, it uses a BGR subpixel layout, which can make text harder to read when using the TV as a PC monitor.

All four HDMI inputs support the full HDMI 2.1 bandwidth, so you can take full advantage of the latest gaming consoles or PCs regardless of the port they're plugged into. 

The TV supports eARC, which lets you pass high-quality, uncompressed audio to a compatible receiver or soundbar through an HDMI cable. It supports all major audio formats, so you don't have to worry about compatibility with external sources.

The Hisense UR8 has a modern, premium design that looks great. 

The center-mounted pedestal stand takes up very little space and supports the TV well. It can be adjusted to a low or high position, so you have options depending on if you need to place a soundbar in front of the TV. 

Footprint of the 65-inch screen: 15.67" x 11.46".

Height: 3.4 inches in the higher position, 2.2 inches in the low-profile position

The back of the TV has a premium checkerboard pattern that resembles older Sony models. There are tracks on the back of the stand to help with cable management.

The Hisense UR8 has excellent build quality. It's a fairly solid TV overall, with no obvious construction issues. 

The Hisense UR8 runs version 14 of the very popular Google TV smart interface. There's a huge selection of apps for both streaming and gaming, it's easy to use, and it supports multiple user profiles. 

Unfortunately, we encountered an issue where the TV's interface continues to loop as if it's booting up. The best way to fix this without factory resetting the TV is to clear the Google TV Launchers data and cache. 

Running AIDA64 on the TV shows that it's powered by the MediaTek Pentonic 800 SoC (HIS9655), with 4GB of RAM and 18GB of total internal storage.

Unfortunately, like most TVs, the interface contains ads. You can opt out of personalized ads, but this doesn't change the number of ads you'll see; they just won't be personalized to match your search and viewing history.

You have the option to set up the TV using the 'Basic Google TV' option, which gets rid of ads but prevents you from using most of the TV's smart features.

The TV's remote has a motion sensitive backlight.

• Quick setup guide
• Remote
• 2x AAA batteries
• Power cable

The Hisense UR8 was originally tested with firmware version V01.01.00F.Q0328.

The Hisense UR8 TV has a decent frequency response. It doesn't output much bass, but it's not non-existent, so the speakers don't sound too hollow. The sound profile has alright balance, but there's a lack of treble when used at maxed volume. Dialogue is easy enough to understand, but the speakers don't get very loud.