An overreliance on Dolby Vision

When I went to Leeds to see the biggest TV in the world, the 116UXN, I was initially impressed by its high brightness and dazzling colour performance. If RGB is the future of TVs, then it’s going to be a very colourful one.

With the test discs I brought with me (Across the Spider-Verse, First Man, Babylon), the 116UXN produced a bright, varied, rich but also balanced colour performance. It served up black levels without much in the way of blooming or bleeding, an impressive level of dimming control for a screen of this size.

While there were some issues: a little bit of green tint here, some colour shifting when up close to the screen and some slightly washed out black levels, the performance seemed a strong one.

And then I switched away from Dolby Vision titles and things were… not so great.

With HDR10 and there was more noticeable discolouration, shots in films went from sharp to soft and back to sharp again. The Dirty Screen Effect seemed more obvious, with images that lacked clarity and detail, along with obvious colour banding. For a £24,999 screen, that’s rather unacceptable.

In HDR10+ the performance slipped further, colours that came across as inconsistent, images with soft sense of detail in dark scenes and the strangest thing was the local dimming struggled to react with scenes that switched from bright and dark, the entire screen repeatedly flashing and over-brightening the image.

You could call these first-gen gremlins that come with every new tech but I think the UXN is too reliant on Dolby Vision to help with its processing.

This is an issue I’ve seen before on Hisense TVs in years past, but I felt the U8Q had shrugged that off with a more consistent performance across all its HDR modes.

It came up again when I went to TCL’s NXT Roadshow event in Paris. There was a line-up of several TVs that included TCL’s SQD Mini LED and RGB Mini LED, a Samsung QN90F, a Sony A95L QD-OLED and a Hisense UXN.

And the Hisense was the worse performing TV of the bunch.

One test feature a white stripe in the middle of a green block, and where the other TVs managed to keep the stripe ‘white’, with the Hisense, the stripe was polluted by green tones surrounded it, coming across as a light green. The Hisense RGB didn’t look very bright, colours were all over the place with red tones looking orange, blues were more teal-like in its Standard picture mode.

Throw in more obvious blooming than other models and it was a very shaky and imprecise performance from the Hisense UXN.

Picture processing is an area that Hisense needs to shore up. The Hisense RGB I saw in Leeds was very reliant on Dolby Vision to control its performance, but without Dolby’s guiding hand, the performance became much more inconsistent.

What this calls into question is Hisense’s PQ philosophy. Every TV brand has one (or should have one), but beyond trying to make its TVs very bright and colourful, I can’t describe what Hisense’s ethos is. Is it respecting the source? Is it going full-on with colour expression? Is it trying to do all the above?

I hope what I saw with the UXN isn’t an omen for the upcoming UXQ, UR9S and UR8S. In all the time I’ve been reviewing Hisense TVs, processing has been hit and miss.

If it truly wants to be a leader in the market, it has to lead the way in picture quality – it has to be better than its rivals. If, like the Fire Horse it wants to have a transformative year, then this is the biggest hurdle it has to clear.