Hisense UX TV Review

The Hisense UX has a premium design, if a bit thick for a high-end TV. Still, most TVs are much thicker at their center point, while this TV is uniformly thick throughout. It has a unique look with angled side speakers and visible screws on the back. The TV has slim adjustable feet that feel sturdy and don't take up much space.

The TV comes with a pair of adjustable feet that support the TV well. They're very thin, made of metal, and have minimal front-to-back wobble.

Footprint of the 85-inch stand in the wide position: 67.9" x 17.7". In the narrow position, the 85-inch stand has a footprint of 18.3" x 12.6". The feet lift the TV about 3.2" above the table, so most soundbars fit in front without blocking the screen, although they won't fit between the feet when they're set in the narrow position.

The back of the TV is made of plastic, with two different textured patterns: vertical lines in its center plate and horizontal lines on the side panels. There's a built-in subwoofer on the back of the TV near the center. Unfortunately, the TV doesn't have clips for cable management, so cables just dangle from its sides. The inputs are recessed on the left-hand side of the TV when facing the front, and they're hard to access when the TV is mounted flat against the wall.

The TV has good build quality. The TV is solid and looks and feels well-built. It's mainly made of hard plastic, with metal feet and borders. There's a bit of front and back wobble, but the feet support the TV well overall. There are no obvious quality control issues with our unit. Unfortunately, there's a large amount of flex on the two plastic panels next to the TV's inputs; it's not worrying, but it's an excessive amount of flex on what is otherwise a premium product.

The TV's contrast is fantastic. Its black levels with local dimming are so low that they go beyond the limits of our LS-100 meter; still, the 404200:1 contrast ratio above is a bit on the high side, as Hisense advertises the TV as having a 150000:1 contrast ratio. Either way, this TV has extremely deep blacks, some of the best we've seen on an LED TV, so it looks amazing in a dark room.

The TV has amazing blooming performance, as the extremely small size of its dimming zones minimizes any blooming around bright objects or subtitles in darker scenes. There's some blooming with bright objects on a black, or near black, background, but it's hard to notice.

Overall, the TV's processing keeps up very well with fast-moving objects, and lighting zone transitions aren't very noticeable, with minimal haloing. Still, small bright objects get so dim with rapid movement that they almost disappear, which is disappointing on a TV with this many dimming zones.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance, which is great.

The TV's HDR peak brightness is fantastic. Even though the TV's brightness is significantly dimmer in large bright scenes, it's still easily bright enough to overcome any number of lights. Highlights are extremely bright and stand out very well.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: HDR Theater
• Brightness: 100
• Gamma: ST2084
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off

We also tested the TV with Dynamic Tone Mapping enabled. Here are the real scene results:

• Hallway Lights: 1042 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 886.5 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 377 cd/m²

The TV's HDR brightness in Game Mode is fantastic. There's no noticeable difference in peak brightness from 'HDR Theater' mode.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point, with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: HDR Game
• Brightness: 100
• Gamma: ST2084
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off

The TV has decent PQ EOTF tracking, but all scenes appear brighter than the content creator intended. The TV hard clips when it reaches its peak brightness, leading to a loss of bright detail. The TV appears to be gaming some test patterns, as its EOTF tracking is much better with a 10% window size, as seen here.

The Hisense UX's SDR brightness is fantastic, so glare isn't an issue even in the brightest rooms. The TV's Automatic Brightness Limiter (ABL) does dim the TV significantly when bright highlights take up a significant portion of the screen, but they're still very bright.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Theater Night
• Brightness: 100
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm 1
• Gamma: 2.2
• Active Contrast: Off

The Hisense ULED X has a fantastic HDR color gamut. It has almost complete coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space, with stellar tone mapping. Some colors notably deviate from what they should be, however; most notably magentas, and reds to a smaller degree. The TV also has great coverage of the wider Rec. 2020 color space, although it struggles with saturated greens and blues, and now most colors deviate from what they should be: reds, magentas, greens, and cyans.

The TV's color volume in HDR is fantastic, helped by the TV's extremely high peak brightness and splendid contrast ratio. It displays colors well across all luminance levels, and colors are bright and vibrant, displaying dark, saturated colors well.

The Hisense UX has decent pre-calibration accuracy in SDR. Still, it's not nearly as good as its siblings, the Hisense U8/U8K and Hisense U7K. Its white balance has a decent amount of accuracy errors, leaning too blue overall. Similarly, color accuracy is decent overall, but there are small accuracy errors in most color gradients. The TV's gamma is good overall but is a bit darker than our 2.2 target for a moderately lit room.

The Hisense 85UX has incredible accuracy after calibration, but like other recent Hisense TVs, it's slightly tricky to calibrate. Here, like on the Hisense U6/U6K, calibration points affect the points above them; 50 adjusts 55, 55 adjusts 60, etc.

You can see our full calibration settings here.

The TV has decent gray uniformity. There's some vignetting in the corners and some dirty screen effect towards the center. The TV's uniformity is almost perfect in dark scenes, however, with no visible backlight bleeding.

The Hisense 85UX has stellar black uniformity. With local dimming disabled, the TV has a noticeable blue tint. With local dimming enabled, there's a bit of blooming around bright objects on dark backgrounds, but it's very minor.

The Hisense UX has a decent viewing angle. The image remains consistent at a moderate angle, but if you move too far off-center, colors fade, and the screen looks washed out. Still, it's good enough for a moderately wide seating arrangement, as you can move around the room without the image degrading.

The TV's reflection handling is fantastic. Its glossy finish reduces the impact of reflections enough that this TV can easily handle even very bright rooms. Unfortunately, the TV's finish also introduces rainbow smear when hit by glare from bright lights, which is distracting if you're sensitive to it.

The Hisense UX has sub-par HDR gradient handling. There's very noticeable banding in bright grays, greens, and blues and noticeable banding in every other color gradient except dark greens and blues. Thankfully, the TV's gradient smoothing feature does a good job of cleaning up the TV's banding.

This TV has very good low-quality content smoothing. It's great at avoiding macro-blocking in dark scenes and preserves fine details well.

The Hisense 85UX has good upscaling capabilities. The resulting image looks sharp overall, with some, but not excessive, blurring. Fine details are preserved well, and text is easy to read.

Sharpness processing was calibrated for low-resolution or low-bitrate content, with no over-sharpening, with the following setting:

• Sharpness: 10

The Hisense UX uses a BGR (blue-green-red) subpixel layout. For multimedia usage, this doesn't cause any issues, but it causes text clarity issues when you use this TV as a PC monitor. There are easy workarounds for these issues, however, and you can read about them here.

Like the Hisense U8/U8K and Hisense U7K, the TV's response time tuning is different when the TV's refresh rate is below and above 100Hz, as seen here. It doesn't cause any issues when running at a fixed refresh rate, but with VRR enabled, the TV's response time behavior rapidly changes as the TV's refresh rate hovers around 100Hz, which is very noticeable.

Like most TVs on the market, this TV uses pulse width modulation (PWM) to dim the backlight. It flickers at 4000Hz in all picture modes and at every brightness level, but it isn't noticeable.

The Hisense 85UX has an optional backlight strobing feature, commonly known as black frame insertion. This feature is meant to reduce persistence blur and improve the appearance of motion. It works well at both 60Hz and 120Hz, leading to a sharp image at the cost of some image duplication.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to interpolate content up to 120 fps. It works decently well with slower content, like slow panning shots, but there's some visible artifacting the moment the action ramps up.

The TV's excellent response time results in a passable stutter performance. Still, there's noticeable stutter in slow-panning shots in 24p content, like movies.

The TV automatically removes judder from any source, ensuring a smooth movie-watching experience.

The Hisense UX supports all three variable refresh rate (VRR) technologies, and its VRR range caps out at 120Hz. When the TV is connected to a PC using an AMD graphics card, it disables HDR when the FreeSync toggle is enabled in the TV's Game Settings menu. For VRR and HDR to work simultaneously, FreeSync needs to be disabled on the TV, although this disables VRR for sources that only use FreeSync for VRR, like older AMD graphic cards.

The Hisense UX has superbly low input lag, but it's higher than most other competing products, including Hisense's other models, the Hisense U8/U8K, Hisense U7K, and even Hisense U6/U6K. It's certainly low enough for all but the most competitive of gamers, but it's disappointing for a premium product like this one.

The TV supports up to 4k @ 120Hz on HDMI ports 3 and 4.

The TV supports chroma 4:4:4 at 4k @ 120Hz with Game Mode enabled, so you can simultaneously have the sharpest text and lowest input lag, although you also need to have the Text Clarity Optimizer enabled.

The Hisense 85UX takes full advantage of the PS5, with 4k @ 120Hz support on HDMI ports 3 and 4 and variable refresh rate (VRR) support.

The TV can nearly take full advantage of the Xbox Series X|S consoles, with 4k @ 120Hz support on HDMI ports 3 and 4, as well as variable refresh rate (VRR) support with both AMD FreeSync and HDMI Forum VRR. Unfortunately, while the TV is advertised as being capable of Dolby Vision gaming at 120Hz, games simply refuse to launch in Dolby Vision mode at that refresh rate, so you have to be in 4k @ 60Hz for it to work correctly.

The TV has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 3 and 4, with both supporting up to 4k @ 120Hz. Unfortunately, HDMI 3 is the eARC port, so you lose one HDMI 2.1 port when you plug a soundbar into the TV. It has an ATSC 3.0 TV tuner, so it streams 4k content over-the-air.

The TV supports eARC and can pass advanced DTS and Dolby formats from a connected source to your soundbar or sound system without reducing audio quality. Unfortunately, it doesn't correctly pass through 7.1 sound through LPCM, as the sound only comes out of two speakers.

The TV has a decent frequency response. Like on almost all TVs, there's very little bass. The TV gets extremely loud, but there are many compression artifacts at max volume. Still, the TV is extremely well-balanced at moderate volume, so dialogue is very clear.

This TV has mediocre distortion performance. There's audible total harmonic distortion, especially at max volume, but thankfully, it's significantly less noticeable at moderate volume.

Unlike the Hisense U8/U8K and Hisense U7K, but like the Hisense U6/U6K, the Hisense UX uses version 11 of Google's popular Google TV OS. It's relatively easy to use and especially fast and smooth, with a large selection of apps.

Like most TVs on the market, this one has ads throughout the interface, and you can't turn them off.

The TV has a great selection of streaming apps, with every popular streaming app being present. The interface is very smooth and pleasant to use.

The TV comes with a great remote. Like most modern remotes, it lacks a numpad, and there are quick-access buttons to popular streaming services. The remote has a built-in mic, and so does the TV for hands-free voice control, giving you access to Google Assistant and Alexa. You can ask the TV to search for content, open apps, ask for the time or the weather, and switch inputs.

There's a button underneath the center of the TV to turn the TV on/off and switch inputs. There's a switch on the right side of the above photo to turn off the mic built into the TV if you're concerned about privacy, seen here.

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