Haier S80 (H75S80GUF) review

While many households around the world may be familiar with the Haier brand from its long-running range of kitchen and laundry appliances, 2026 marks the brand’s debut as a TV manufacturer.

Haier’s lack of experience, though, hasn’t stopped it from making an instant splash with a debut TV range that combines big screens with small prices to eye-catching effect.

The H75S80GUF is a perfect example of this straightforward but bold launch strategy, offering a 75-inch screen for the relatively paltry sum of £699.

If this set can actually add some decent picture and sound quality to its price appeal, Haier will really be off to a flyer.

Price

The 75-inch S80’s £700 price in the UK (it isn’t available in the US or Australia) is seriously low for any 75-inch TV, never mind one that offers such attractions as Quantum Dot colours and a smart system that includes both Fire TV and the UK-specific Freely service.

The S80 range also includes a 43-inch model for £280, a 50-inch model for £350, a 55-inch model for £430, and a 65-inch model for £500. Those are all aggressive prices, but the 65- and 75-inch sets look particularly great value.

Other notable budget sets around at the moment are the £299 50-inch Sharp 4T-C50HJ6725KB, with its Roku TV smarts, while the 75-inch version of the Award-winning TCL P8L will set you back £970.

Design

The Haier S80 looks pretty classy for such a cheap TV – provided you don’t get too close to it, anyway. Or look around the back.

The frame around the screen is remarkably slim by budget TV standards, and what there is of it features an appealing textured finish that hides the set’s actually rather flimsy and plasticky core build quality. You can’t ignore how light the H75S80GUF is for a 75-inch TV when you’re attaching its feet and moving it into position in your living room, though.

Those feet are almost as lightweight as the screen they support, too, and since they can only be attached out towards the 75-inch TV’s bottom corners, you’re going to need a pretty large bit of furniture to place the TV on. Unless you’re wall-mounting it, of course – at which point the screen’s lightweight build quality becomes welcome, while its rather chunky rear depth does not.

The S80 ships with a remote control that’s as plasticky as the TV. This handset actually proves quite easy to use, though, thanks to its large buttons and reasonably ergonomic layout and shape.

Features

The 4K-resolution panel the 75-inch Haier S80 is built on is a VA type, so limited in viewing angles versus the IPS alternative, but more likely to deliver dark scenes more effectively. The panel is illuminated by LEDs placed right behind the screen, too, rather than around its edges, which again usually contributes to better contrast performance than the edge-lit alternative.

The S80 carries a degree of global light control capable of adjusting the overall brightness of the picture in response to what the image contains to enhance contrast. Not surprisingly given its price, though, Haier’s TV doesn’t carry any local dimming, where different zones of the LED backlights output different amounts of light to suit the picture’s needs.

The S80 is the latest on a fast-growing list of budget TVs that use Quantum Dots to deliver their colour rather than the dimmer, less dynamic RGB filter system that used to be the norm for budget TVs.

The H75S80GUF is natively a 60Hz panel but it can, according to Haier, use Dual Line Gate technology to get up to 120Hz at 1080p resolution for gamers. We should say, though, that we couldn’t get this feature to work with an Xbox Series X. We switched the feature on in the TV’s menus, but the Xbox refused to recognise that a 120Hz output was possible. Even after manually setting the console’s resolution to 1080p.

VRR is supported and working, though, as is ALLM switching. In its low-latency Game mode, input lag is 26.2ms – a decent rather than great result.

The S80’s HDR support extends beyond HDR10 and HLG to the HDR10+ format, with its extra scene-by-scene picture information. Haier has not coughed up for a Dolby Vision license, though.

Smart/streaming features are provided by two sources: Fire TV (OS 8) and Freely. Fire TV provides a comprehensive collection of the world’s most popular streaming services, while Freely allows UK viewers to watch most of the channels on the Freeview HD platform over the internet, rather than needing an aerial. This is a great combination of streamed sources to find on a TV as affordable as this one.

The S80’s connections, finally, comprise three HDMI ports, two USB ports, a 3.5mm headphone jack, an optical digital audio output, an Ethernet port, and both satellite and aerial RF inputs. As well as wireless connectivity courtesy of Bluetooth and wi-fi.

Picture quality

The S80’s pictures deliver an almost bewildering combination of inexperience and surprising strengths, chiefly built around the wildly disparate efforts of its Standard and Movie picture presets.

The Standard mode, which, as usual with such modes, is aimed at regular daytime living room use, is frankly a bit nuts. In particular, it pushes colours far too hard, leading to some seriously overcooked shades when rendering any relatively pure areas of red, green or blue, as well as disturbingly peaky skin tones that leave most people looking seriously flushed.

To be fair, the Standard mode’s excesses do leave you in no doubt that the H75S80GUF is capable of producing unusually rich and vibrant colours for such a cheap TV. The problem is that it does this without anywhere near enough control or restraint to deliver a picture that you can actually settle into and enjoy.

Haier’s TV also succeeds in delivering more brightness than we’d normally expect to see with such a cheap TV. Haier claims 350 nits for it, but in the Standard mode it seems significantly punchier than that for most of the time – even if you’re watching SDR content. While this brightness initially impresses, though, at least with HDR, it causes subtle shading information to be clipped out of bright HDR highlights.

The Standard preset does produce, though, a quite strong sense of contrast with images that contain a mix of very bright and dark content. As with its colour performance, however, there’s no control behind this contrast, meaning that light peaks look too bright (because of the clipping) while shadows look too inky (because they lack sufficient shading finesse and shadow detail).

Very dark scenes, meanwhile, reveal some very average blacks. Everything that should look black, in fact, ends up looking grey and washed out – an immersion-busting issue that makes dark scenes feel very different in tone to bright ones.

The dark scene performance isn’t helped, either, by the appearance of significant backlight seepage into the image’s outer edges. You aren’t really aware of this while watching bright footage, but all too often it causes dark scenes to appear with a distractingly distinct frame-within-a-frame effect.

While the S80’s Standard mode feels like the immature efforts of a new brand to show off what its debut TV can do without sparing a thought for consistency or naturalism, though, its Movie mode provides a welcome insight into some genuine future potential.

For starters, the Movie mode picture is actually nicely balanced. While colours still look fairly vibrant compared with most TVs at this price level, no tones stand out too much against the rest. For the most part, those tones also look natural and believable. Even with skin.

There’s also more visible shadow detailing in Movie mode, and the TV suddenly proves able to produce some pleasingly subtle, faint colours in those shadow details, too.

The brightest peaks of HDR images in Movie mode no longer lose anywhere near as much shading detail as they do in Standard mode, meaning they no longer look like white holes ripped out of the picture. The improved shadow detail and dark colour performance also mean dark scenes look much more convincing and immersive than their Standard mode counterparts. Especially as the various backlight control options the TV provides do their work without causing any flickering or floating black level issues.

Unfortunately, though, basic blacks in Movie mode are still pretty grey and, worse, the light seepage creeping in from the image’s edges is still distracting. Maybe more so, actually, than it is in the Standard preset.

Calling in a Dynamic Contrast feature (that’s off by default) improves black levels and reduces the obviousness of the light seepage. It also, though, really dims the picture down – so much so that the amount of shadow detail that gets crushed out of the picture can become excessive, and HDR pictures no longer feel like HDR.

There’s disappointment in store with the Haier’s Game mode, too. As well as not delivering the promised 120Hz capabilities with our resident Xbox Series X, the TV’s 60Hz performance proves pretty unpleasant, with substantial judder and blur joining the screen’s slightly high lag in making the gaming experience feel rather disconnected and fatiguing.

Motion with 24p movies looks a bit uncomfortable, too, though you can improve this a little, at least, by calling in an MEMC motion processing system.

Sound quality

First impressions of the S80’s sound are underwhelming to say the least. It can’t get very loud at all – certainly not loud enough to deliver an appropriate scale of sound for its 75-inch pictures – and there isn’t enough oomph to its presentation, especially at the bass end, to stop it sounding feeble and thin.

The sound also has next to no forward presence, leaving everything lacking impact and locked in the TV. The S80’s basic lack of power prevents it from being able to deliver the variation in density and volume that makes action movie soundtracks tick, too.

Over time, though, the S80's sound grows on us a bit. Dialogue, for instance, is always clear and intelligible, and usually (aside from some deep male voices) seems to be coming from the screen rather than the speakers mounted behind its bottom edge.

The way the TV often seems to deliberately choose not to even bother trying to take on big soundtrack moments, too, means that the speakers don’t fall prey to nasty distortions or other issues associated with speakers being driven harder than they can tolerate. This lack of distortion makes up a bit for the H75S80GUF’s lack of power and impact, and allows your ears to acclimatise somewhat to the sound’s thin quality over time. At no point, though, does its sound become more than distinctly average, and a dedicated sound system, even a cheap soundbar, is highly recommended.

Verdict

The first Haier TV to arrive on our test benches is a bit more of a mixed bag than we had hoped it might be.

The main thing that its ‘showcase’ Standard preset actually showcases is how little Haier seems to understand about what makes TV pictures enjoyable to watch. Yet its thoughtful Movie mode suddenly makes you think that Haier actually does understand picture quality after all.

Unfortunately, a couple of fundamental limitations of its panel prevent even the S80's Movie preset from elevating it beyond three-star territory. It does do enough, though, to mark Haier out as a brand to watch for the future.

SCORES

• Picture 3
• Sound 3
• Features 4

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