Hands on: Hisense 116UXS review

Hisense couldn’t really have been much clearer at this year’s CES about its intentions/ambitions for 2026.

Basically, it wants to complete its transformation from perceived AV technology follower into recognised AV tech leader – and it has identified RGB Mini LED TVs as its best opportunity to achieve this.

Hisense sees itself as the originator of RGB Mini LED technology, having been the first brand to a) unveil a consumer-facing RGB Mini LED TV back at CES 2025, and b) follow through on that announcement by being the first brand actually to bring an RGB Mini LED TV, the 116UX, to market in the latter half of last year.

Now, while other major brands are only just getting their debut RGB Mini LED TV house in order, Hisense has already unveiled a significant new advancement of its favourite TV technology.

The so-called RGB Mini LED Evo (no doubt LG loves that…) screen that’s set to appear in Hisense’s 2026 flagship 116-inch UXS TV will feature an additional new cyan LED in each backlight zone alongside the original red, green and blue ones that gave RGB Mini LED its name.

Are four colours really better than three, though, or is the 116UXS just another slice of CES hype?

Price

With the 116UXS not likely to be going on sale until well into the second half of 2026, Hisense isn’t yet prepared to attach a price to its ground-breaking new RGB Mini LED Evo model.

It’s not unreasonable to think, though, that it will track in the same price ballpark as the preceding 116UX. That monster set launched at £24,999 before dropping at some online retailers to £19,999.

In other words, as is so often the case, the showcase of a potentially major screen advance isn’t going to come cheap.

It’s worth adding that Hisense is launching what seem set to be a couple of fairly mass market-priced regular RGB Mini LED TV ranges (without the new Evo tech) for 2026, only a few months after the 116UX dropped. Perhaps we can hope for the same thing to happen with RGB Mini LED Evo screens down the line in 2027.

Design

Comparisons with the 116UX continue with the 116UXS’s design. In fact, without having a 116UX sat alongside the 116UXS for minute comparisons, we’d say the two sets look pretty much identical.

So their bodywork features the same perforated left and right side tubes, which house parts of a substantial audio system; very similar chunky blade-style metallic feet (though you can also wall mount the TVs if you have a wall strong enough, of course); and the same chunky grilled top edge, which houses more of the TV’s speaker setup.

Accommodating this audio system means the 116UXS doesn’t deliver the trimness from front to back (it’s 4cm deep) that some people like to see with premium TVs.

The metallic finish of the audio tubes and top panel looks suitably premium, though, and actually, having your pictures and sound delivered by one slightly chunky picture and sound all-rounder is still tidier than having a slimmer screen partnered with some sort of external sound solution.

Features

Clearly, the biggest feature of the 116UXS is its introduction of Hisense’s RGB Mini LED Evo technology. The last time we can recall a brand adding a fourth ‘sub-pixel’ (in that case, yellow) to its TVs was Sharp with its short-lived Quattron technology way back in 2010.

Adding a cyan LED alongside the usual red, green and blue pixels for the 116UXS, though, feels as though it’s going to be anything but a short-lived ‘experiment’. In fact, Hisense openly discussed with us the potential for further colour sub-pixels to be added in the future. For now, though, it has chosen to focus on cyan.

Cyan, says Hisense, sits in the area of the colour spectrum where human vision is most sensitive to subtle colour changes. So adding cyan LEDs to the 116UXS backlight mix should enable it to render subtler gradients, tones and transitions that even an untrained eye should clearly be able to see – enhancing the image’s sense of depth and naturalism.

Hisense’s Sonny Ming (General Manager of Product Marketing and Scenario Product Operation) was also keen to stress, when we sat down for a chat with him, that Hisense hasn’t just added cyan LEDs to the 116UXS and left it at that – it has also recalibrated the weight of the red, green and blue LEDs so that the addition of cyan properly enhances the overall colour experience, rather than upsetting the colour balance in any way.

The new colour configuration should, according to Hisense’s claims (which we haven’t been able to verify with our own testing at this stage) deliver 99.3 per cent red colour purity, 92 per cent green purity, 100 per cent blue purity, 6 per cent more accuracy when rendering the BT.2020 colour spectrum than QD-OLED TVs can achieve, and 23 per cent more BT.2020 accuracy than QD Mini LED TVs can achieve.

It should also, says Hisense, produce fewer eye-damaging blue light emissions than either QD-OLED or QD Mini LED produce, and be able to cover an unprecedented 110 per cent of the BT.2020 colour spectrum.

Hisense claims that its new technology is 30 per cent more energy efficient than QD-OLED displays, and Hisense’s latest Hi-View AI Engine RGB processing system has been further enhanced to take account of the new panel structure as it goes about optimising how it displays images.

Hisense claims the new Hi-View engine has 40 per cent more computing performance, 70 per cent more content scene recognition power, and 100 per cent more scene adaptation power to feed into the screen’s AI picture, AI Sound and AI Scenario picture enhancement tools.

The AI Picture system now includes a dedicated AI RGB Colour Dimming element that Hisense says “elevates traditional local dimming from simple brightness control to full spectrum, synchronised colour and brightness control”.

This is essentially Hisense referring to the ability of each red, green, blue and now cyan LED to have its brightness independently controlled for each lighting ‘zone’. Using this dimming metric, Hisense is able to claim more than 40,000 “colour dimming zones” for the 116UXS.

The AI Picture system is also claimed to include improved 4K upscaling of sub-4K sources; a new AI-driven HDR upscaler for turning non HDR content into HDR; improved RGB tone mapping to solve the potential issue of colour shift when moving from conventional processing to RGB Mini LED rendering; AI RGB Colour Peaking that apparently intelligently optimises the screen’s power usage to enhance brightness, delivering more consistency and stability when rendering chromatic highlights; and a new AI system for removing potential banding noise from HDR colour blends.

Hisense’s AI Scenario detection feature, meanwhile, now claims to have specific optimised Sports, Game and Film modes that the TV can automatically switch to based on more accurate detection of the sort of content you’re watching.

The 116UXS is claimed to be capable of hitting brightness levels of well over 8000 nits too, and its new screen technology is joined by a return of the Devialet Opéra De Paris 6.2.2-channel integrated sound system found on 2025’s 116UX.

The latest version of this Devialet-designed speaker system includes a back-to-back subwoofer configuration to minimise unwanted cabinet vibrations and distortions, a new Room Fitting Tuning feature that optimises the sound-stage presentation to your room setup, and an AI Clear Voice option that can isolate and amplify dialogue independently of the rest of the mix.

There will be a fairly major update to the 116UXS’s smart system, finally, as Hisense has announced that its usual Vidaa system will be rebranded as Home OS, reflecting the expanding use of Hisense’s proprietary smart system across other products in the home.

Picture quality

Right off the bat, it’s important to note that fully delving into the extra colour range and nuance that Hisense claims is made possible by RGB Mini LED Evo technology will require even more extensive testing than usual once we’re able to get a 116UXS into a more controllable location. It’s also worth remembering that the 116UXS is still many months away from its consumer launch.

With those words of caution covered, though, Hisense did have a remarkable number of 116UXS screens on its CES stand, including some in relatively dark corners to go with the attention grabbers positioned at the front. So, overall, we were able to get a pretty varied look at what the new screen seems able to do.

Despite the 116UXS’s advances being mostly built on colour, as with last year’s 116UX, it was actually the new screen’s brightness that first drew our eye. Hisense’s various demo reel content contained all sorts of ultra-bright HDR imagery that looked consistently so extremely bright that we completely forgot we were looking at these screens in locations as big and heavily illuminated as Las Vegas’s colossal CES halls.

The level of brightness the 116UXS can produce might have some AV fans worried that they’ll need to don sunglasses if they install it in a darkened cinema room. Actually, though, even in the darkest areas of Hisense’s stand, we personally never found the intensity too much.

In fact, the screen’s use of light actually felt more natural and intelligent than it did on the original UX RGB Mini LED screens, with an enhanced sense of light subtlety across the TV’s extreme HDR spectrum – including reduced clipping (lost shading) in the image’s most extreme highlights – despite the TVs using clearly aggressive picture settings to combat the CES show floor environment.

Not surprisingly, Hisense included a section of demo content containing a block of pure cyan, and this really sold the point about the usefulness to colour volume and general image brightness consistency of having as many dedicated colour LEDs as possible.

We didn’t feel strongly aware of any obvious dimming in the image’s intensity when it was showing pure red, green, blue or cyan colours versus colours created from a mix of the core elements, in fact, which counters a potential issue with RGB Mini LED technology.

Adding to the sense of radiance and colour volume the 116UXS can deliver is what appeared to be a seriously promising black-level performance. Many shots in the demo reel featured ultra-bright, richly saturated elements against full black backdrops, and these backdrops appeared to be pretty much free from any sign of general low-contrast greyness or local dimming haloing or blooming problems. Especially when viewing the screen fairly square-on.

Even the darkest parts of Hisense’s demo areas weren’t dark enough to allow us to absolutely confirm that the 116UXS tackles the occasionally slightly messy backlight fluctuations and blocking spotted when we tested the 116UX, but our general impression was at least promising. The blackness didn’t seem to become greyer and the bold colours didn’t seem to heavily desaturate when we watched the 116UXS from even quite severe angles, either.

The 116UXS’s sharpness is excellent for such a huge screen too, combining with what appeared to be pretty much infinitely subtle and banding-free colour shading to deliver a wonderful sense of depth and three-dimensionality.

A combination of the single-minded enthusiasm of Hisense’s demo material and the hands-on conditions available to us at CES 2026 did mean we couldn’t get much of a feel for how well the RGB Mini LED Evo system handles relatively complex content with lots of subtle colours and variations – the sort of content, in other words, that might really challenge the intelligence of the RGB Mini LED Evo LED configuration and dimming engine.

We’ll also need much more controlled lighting conditions to feel more confident about the screen’s handling of backlight blooming when using less extreme, more accuracy-focused picture settings.

All the areas that we could cast early judgment on, however, were certainly very promising.

Sound quality

There was really no opportunity to give the 116UXS’s sound system a proper workout at CES 2026.

Given how similar the 116UXS’s speaker setup and Devialet tuning are to that of the 116UX, though, it should deliver many of the same positive audio attributes that its predecessor did.

That should include plenty of volume; a really impressive ability to have the sound feel as though it’s coming from all the way across the screen rather than emerging only from its edges; clear, well-placed dialogue; nicely rounded peak trebles; and good detailing.

We didn’t see anything in the 116UXS’s audio arrangement to make us think it might deliver more forward audio impact than we got from the slightly swallowed-sounding 116UX, but there is potential in some of Hisense’s claims for the new screen to deliver heavier and less distorted bass.

Early verdict

There seems little doubt from what we have seen so far that the 116UXS will improve on its predecessor, offering both even more spectacle and, more importantly, more colour consistency and balance.

Improved local-dimming control also looks likely from our experience of the 116UXS to date – though hopefully Hisense’s focus on quite extreme demo content was just down to a desire to show off how far its technology can be pushed rather than an attempt to hide any potential ongoing weaknesses with its exciting and potentially hugely influential new TV tech.

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Check out our super-thorough hands-on review of the preceding Hisense 116UX

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