Hands on: Hisense 116UX review

At both January’s CES in Las Vegas and the recent IFA technology show in Berlin, the hottest topic of conversation in the TV world was RGB Mini LED technology.

This creates colours by using individual red, green and blue LEDs rather than shining a blue or white light through (usually Quantum Dot) RGB colour filters.

There’s currently no single name for this approach; different brands call it different things, and there are small variations in how different brands are applying the core new technology. But demos of the technology in action have all been pretty spectacular, suggesting that another true sea-change in TV performance is upon us.

The race to bring this exciting new technology to market first has been won by Hisense, in the epic shape of the 116-inch 116UX.

Being first with such a key technology is itself a significant feather in the cap for the Chinese brand, but making its first ‘RGB Mini LED’ TV a huge 116UX model backed up by all manner of other serious performance-enhancing features feels like a major statement of intent. Hisense, folks, now wants to lead the TV conversation rather than follow it.

The extravagant claims Hisense is making for its RGB Mini LED debutante include coverage of more than 90 per cent of the extreme BT 2020 colour gamut, peak brightness beyond 8000 nits and thousands of separately controlled local dimming zones – so when the opportunity arose for us to spend some quality time with a 116UX we could hardly pass it up. Even though the logistics of handling a 116-inch screen meant travelling to Hisense’s Leeds UK HQ to see the beast in action rather than taking delivery of it in our usual test rooms.

We were, though, given a full day to ourselves with a full production, store-ready 116UX sample, in a room where we could have complete control over ambient light levels and feed the TV any content we liked using our own sources. So the experience we’re about to describe is about as close to a full review as we could get without actually being able to call it a full review.

Price

Of the many big numbers associated with the Hisense 116UX, there’s no avoiding the fact that the biggest is its £24,999 / $29,999 / AU$39,995 price tag.

This is new car/first home deposit level money rather than the sort of sum the vast majority of even the most ardent AV fans would consider dropping on a TV.

To be fair, though, this is pretty much the same price Sony expects you to pay for its fantastic Bravia Projector 9 SXRD projector, or LG expects you to pay for the 97-inch version of its G5 OLED TV. And the 116UX claims to deliver much more brightness and colour range than either of those rival displays.

So, ultimately, while precious few people will ever be in a position to buy one, the 116UX’s price is hardly unprecedented in the big-screen AV world – especially when you’re talking about a screen that boasts a promising new display technology.

Design

You won’t be surprised to hear that the Hisense 116UX’s design is dominated by its enormity.

It totally dominated the large (way bigger than any typical living room) conference-style room we looked at the TV in, and completely filled our field of view when we were sitting what felt like the optimum distance away from it.

As such, it delivers the same sort of overwhelming home cinema experience usually only possible from a premium projector.

Not surprisingly, all that screen acreage needs to be held in a seriously robust chassis.

Hisense has managed to make this chassis look about as attractive as such heavy-duty bodywork can, though, thanks to a premium metallic finish, eye-catching speaker ‘tubes’ running down each of the screen’s sides, and further grilled speaker areas unexpectedly built into the screen’s top edge.

The TV helpfully ships with detachable carry handles on its back (though we recommend having the set installed for you by professionals if possible, rather than taking it on yourself with a few mates in tow), and it sits on a pair of strong but slender blade-style feet that you scarcely notice against all the screen above them.

The epic but glamorous TV is joined by a pleasingly premium-feeling remote control that again sports a metallic finish and also carries a solar panel at its bottom. So while you may have blown a small fortune on the TV, at least you don’t need to buy any batteries for the remote. Yay.

Features

As you’d hope with a £24,999 / $29,999 / $39,995 TV, the 116UX boasts numerous headline-grabbing features.

There’s its 116-inch screen. There’s the illumination of that screen by the all-important new RGB Mini LED technology. There’s a local dimming system that operates over a huge 3584 separately controlled zones. There’s a claimed massive peak brightness of 8000 nits.

In short, this is anything but just another TV.

Delving behind these headline features, the 116UX’s numerous cutting-edge attributes are controlled by a new high-powered Hi-View AI Engine X processor specially developed to unlock the potential of the 116UX’s ground-breaking hardware.

The 116UX is very much a TV rather than just the ‘dumb’ monitor we might have expected. So, as well as a Freeview HD tuner, it carries Hisense’s VIDAA smart system, which now incorporates the UK’s Freely streaming service alongside more expected streaming big hitters such as Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, YouTube and Apple TV+.

Freely allows you to live stream the majority of the channels carried on the Freeview HD platform, rather than having to receive them via a digital aerial, and it provides more than 10,000 hours of on-demand content from the libraries of the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5.

Gamers are predictably well catered for by Hisense’s new flagship TV. The three provided HDMI ports all support frame rates up to 165Hz, VRR (including the AMD Freesync Premium Pro format), HDR gaming (including a low-latency Dolby Vision mode), and ALLM switching when a game source is detected. Input lag at 60Hz is just 14.6ms when the TV’s in its game mode.

If you’re thinking it’s a bit strange that there are only three HDMI sockets on a £25K TV, Hisense provides a pretty good excuse in the shape of a USB-C style Display Port socket. These are very rare finds in the TV world, but some PC gamers will definitely appreciate having one on the 116UX.

We’ve already given away the fact that the 116UX’s HDR support includes the premium Dolby Vision format, but it also extends to the rival HDR10+ format which, like Dolby Vision, adds extra scene-by-scene picture information to the video stream.

The 116UX’s mammoth screen sports an Anti-Reflection filter to subdue the potentially dramatic impact that reflections could have on such a huge screen area, while a so-called ‘CineStage X Surround’ integrated sound system turns out to be a 6.2.2-channel ‘Opera de Paris’ affair designed with renowned premium French audio brand Devialet.

Picture

While one of the Hisense 116UX’s most eye-catching features doesn’t really pan out, there’s still no question whatsoever that it represents the front line of a whole new generation of TV picture quality.

But let’s start with that thing that didn’t play out as hoped: the claimed 8000 nits of brightness.

The thing is, the only way to get this peak brightness out of the 116UX is to select its Dynamic picture preset and then turn on an AI Brightness Boost feature. Taking these steps does indeed dial up the intensity of the 116UX’s small HDR highlights to unprecedented heights, but it also causes bright colours to blow out so much at times that they look almost radioactive, and clips shading detail out of the brightest image areas to an alarmingly aggressive degree.

In short, it’s pretty easy to see why Hisense itself doesn’t put the AI Brightness Booster on by default with any of the 116UX’s picture presets, even the Dynamic one.

Swiftly switching to the 116UX’s Standard picture preset and turning the AI Brightness Booster off sees peak brightness essentially halve. But the results are still among the brightest we’ve ever seen from a TV, and actually do a much better job of showing off the remarkable range and volume of colour the 116UX can reproduce.

We really are talking about uncharted colour territory here. Favourite 4K Blu-ray sequences we’ve watched a thousand times are delivered with levels of vibrancy we simply have never seen before, as the 116UX clearly pushes far beyond 100 per cent coverage of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum used for most HDR remastering.

Of course, an AV purist may well wonder what the point is of taking imaging capabilities as far beyond established mastering standards as the Hisense 116UX does. But the answer to this is that when such ‘expansion’ of native standards is done well, it just looks absolutely spectacular – in much the same way that a good HDR TV’s Standard picture setting can ‘boost’ SDR content.

And, in the 116UX’s case, the expansion of the HDR experience produced by RGB Mini LED technology working together with the Standard mode’s brightness delivers spectacle on a truly unprecedented scale. Colours in particular stretch to places we’ve never seen before.

Without the AI Brightness Booster on, the 116UX also does a good job of revealing decent levels of tonal subtlety and blend finesse amid all the extreme saturations and colour volumes. This helps pictures feel ‘lived in’, dense and authentic despite the astonishing colour intensity, and ensures that native 4K images, at least, don’t feel soft or blocky despite the immensity of the screen they’re playing out on.

Forcing ourselves to look past the 116UX’s brightness and colour exuberance also reveals mostly very good delivery of dark image areas. Images containing one or two really extreme light peaks against very dark backgrounds experience practically no reduction in the intensity of the bright bits, but also typically little to no backlight blooming creeping into the dark areas around the highlights.

While we imagine most 116UX owners will opt to stick with the Standard picture preset for most of the time to exploit their premium TV’s ground-breaking capabilities, home cinema fans will be pleased to note that the 116UX also carries a Filmmaker Mode which, to its credit, really hammers down the screen’s brightness and colour range to get close to the established video standards used to master pretty much every current film or TV show.

The Filmmaker Mode also introduces us to the first of a cluster of niggles with the 116UX, though. Some colour tones just don’t look quite right in either the SDR and HDR Filmmaker Modes. Deep greens sometimes look almost brown, for instance, while deep blues and reds don’t seem to fit in properly with the rest of the palette, looking more like video game creations than real-world captures.

Colours actually look more consistently believable, for all their exuberance, in the 116UX’s Standard mode, simply because the overall tonal presentation feels more balanced. There are certainly still moments in Standard mode, though, where a particularly vibrant hue – especially a rich, relatively pure red or green – can look exaggerated or noticeably off-key.

Also, while the 116UX’s local dimming system is generally excellent, dark scenes featuring either multiple extreme bright and dark areas or a few very faint areas of shadow detail can start to look noticeably misty.

This backlight clouding becomes even more obvious if you have to watch the 116UX from much of an angle, and while the anti-reflection filter Hisense has applied to its monster TV subdues the intensity of reflections on the screen, it doesn’t completely block them in the way the filters on some of today’s rival TVs do. And any reflection on a screen this big can prove more distracting than it would on a ‘regular-sized’ TV.

Finally in the negative column, while the 116UX’s HD/SD upscaling (which is clearly more important on a 116-inch TV than it is on, say, a 55-inch model) is pretty good at creating quite dense and sharp 4K images, it isn’t as able as we’d like at removing noise or excessive grain from low-resolution sources before applying its upscaling processes, with the result that such source noise tends to look a bit exaggerated and processed.

Sound

The 116UX’s multi-channel, Devialet-assisted sound system gets off to a great start by managing to create a soundstage that feels like it runs right across the width of the screen as well as beyond its top and side edges. There isn’t the sense of a soundless hole where the screen is that we’d feared we’d get with speakers only built around the screen’s edges.

Details both large and small are crystal clear and well placed in the TV’s huge wall of sound, while dialogue is compelling and clear as well as sounding locked to the screen where (usually) it’s supposed to be. High-pitched sounds don’t come across thin or harsh, and the speakers are powerful enough to take on fairly dense action scene moments without becoming constricted or muddy.

Surprisingly, given the presence of four fairly large "subwoofers" (Hisense's word) on the 116UX’s rear, though, Hisense’s TV hits its low frequency limit a little earlier down the frequency response range than we’d have liked, with its speakers succumbing to crackling and distortions a little too readily when pushed by the film world’s most extreme rumbles.

Perhaps connected with this, the soundstage can peter away a bit as particularly dense soundtrack moments grow to their crescendos, and in a perfect world, the sound would be propelled forward from the screen more; as it stands, the action seems to be taking place more behind the screen than around your viewing position.

Overall, though, the 116UX’s audio is still well above TV world par, and for the most part succeeds in creating a scale of sound that feels proportionate to the colossal images it’s producing.

Verdict

Hisense’s 116UX does a compelling job of introducing the game-changing potential of RGB Mini LED technology. Colours boldly go where no TV colours have gone before, accompanied and expanded by more brightness than we’ve ever seen on a non-prototype TV, too.

Some may question why we need images as extreme as those the 116UX can deliver when content creators are still operating in a much more conservative picture world, but Hisense’s set does a decent job of ‘upgrading’ today’s content to exploit what its screen can do. And anyway, there’s always the hope that the ‘if you build it, they will come’ principle might apply to content creators as well as Kevin Costner’s baseball idols.

It sometimes seems, though, as if Hisense is struggling to manage the full potential of the beast it’s created, with the occasional rogue colour tone or misty-looking dark scene creeping in to momentarily distract you from the mostly mind-bending spectacle. So while there’s no doubting the 116UX’s spectacle and the potential of Hisense’s RGB Mini LED technology, this debut model doesn't seem quite consistent enough for £24,999 to earn a totally unbridled recommendation.

MORE:

These are the best TVs you can buy right now

Here’s everything you need to know about RGB Mini LED TV

Four companies are making next-gen RGB LED TVs, and I saw them all in the space of 24 hours – here's what the new panel technology does best