First HDR TV: Hisense U6GR 55"

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When my 8 year old Vizio P-series 60" died a few weeks ago, I temporarily moved my cheapo Insignia 58" F30 down to my living room for stand-in duty and immediately longed for my old set. The colors were washed out, black levels were terrible, and motion was a joke. Sure, it was fine in the bedroom with a 23' viewing distance and half asleep eyes but it was all but unwatchable day to day.

Best Buy ran a 24 hour flash sale this past Friday, which allowed me to snag the 55" Hisense U6GR for $359. Now that it's home and set up, all I can say is WOW. No, it's not an OLED but for the price I am BLOWN away. The colors are stunning, black levels inky, motion and gradient handling leave little to be desired.

So far, I've only tested HDR content from YouTube and Netflix, but I'll soon find the time to get it hooked up to my Sony X800 Blu-Ray player to get the full experience.

If anyone is looking for an affordable way to get into the HDR game, this set is it.
 
If anyone is looking for an affordable way to get into the HDR game, this set is it.
I'd wait and see if it really is "affordable" I've heard bad things about TCL and Hisense in terms of QC and longevity, higher end name brand sets are reasonably affordable these days, so in order to make cheap TVs cheap these days , they had to cut costs somewhere, and where they do is in the lack of QC and by cost cutting every cent on the BOM, so the backlight might start going in about a year or two, when you consider that you might only get 1 or 2 years before you have to buy another one, I don't see where cheap TVs pay anymore.
 
Good to know. I spent over a week getting my Samsung were I didn't want to fiddle with the picture.
The tricky part was figuring out brightness and the separate "back-lighting" companion settings.

It's so funny and sad actually when i go to a friend's or relatives house they show off their expensive SONY or whatever and they have the thing set to store display setting with cartoon-ish over saturated colour, high contrast with blinding whites and dead blacks. Live sports were looking worse than a cheap Gen 1 playstation!

My comcast x1 box has been giving me the best picture quality out of HDMI, A hardwired Roku box was terrible with very noticeable, laggy motion artifacts. The Firestick has a good picture but ( i am guessing) it was yanking too much current out of the HDMI and almost most toasted my input board. All the previously acceptable picture settings were now pushed way off and it pulled down and 'off-calibrated" the adjacent HDMI inputs too.

I want something with ARC for audio extraction for just 2.1 or 2.0 external sound then maybe some built in usable SMART capability so I can avoid trouble with the dongles.

- Happy 2023 !
 
I'd wait and see if it really is "affordable" I've heard bad things about TCL and Hisense in terms of QC and longevity, higher end name brand sets are reasonably affordable these days, so in order to make cheap TVs cheap these days , they had to cut costs somewhere, and where they do is in the lack of QC and by cost cutting every cent on the BOM, so the backlight might start going in about a year or two, when you consider that you might only get 1 or 2 years before you have to buy another one, I don't see where cheap TVs pay anymore.
Can't be any worse than my last Samsung. This is three years old and the visual distortions you can see on bottom are much more pronounced IRL. The largest goes right up the center almost up to Settings. Absolutely garbage...
IMG_4576.jpeg
 
That display looks like it got racked.
My 39" TV only cost as much a 1 .5 months of xfinity subscripition.
Basically throw away. But a great picture and I am picky. Replaced a $1100 panasonic superflat tube monitor.
A 39" widescreen has approx the same height as 32" 4:3 aspect screen so it looked HUGE at home in the tubes place.

At my last job (QC), in one area, the techs ripped apart brand new LCD TVs and took the boards and panels out and re-cased them for deployment to infamous three-letter "alphabet soup" agencies.

We got a few de-lam'd displays every couple months that we had to return intact to our suppliers. Many of them came out of clean looking boxes. I am sure a 5 foot drop onto one corner side face of the carton would do it in. The Styrofoam insert was only about three inches thick at the perimeter. Most of the damage was apparently from loading pallets into the trailer and ramming a pallet of product into a placed pallet puncturing a carton face.

I detest doing QC and FMEA, ISO 9001, etc, but there were lots of jobs out there for it. They pay well, but not enough for the aggravation :) I just wanted a 5-7 year bridge to late retirement. I was there for 7.5 then resigned.

- Ken
 
I have the entry level A6 in the bedroom and office, great sets even for the budget model.
 
....
. No, it's not an OLED but for the price I am BLOWN away. The colors are stunning, black levels inky, motion and gradient handling leave little to be desired.

If anyone is looking for an affordable way to get into the HDR game, this set is it.
Dont disparage your TV because it's not OLED. Every technology has its place though with marketing you would never know that.

By nature your LED (aka led) will be a brighter picture no matter the price range. (in most cases)
OLED in the lower price range in most cases will not match that brightness. So if you have a bright room OLED can be a disadvantage unless you spend way more, if even then.

Hope you are enjoying it. Keep us up to date how you make out with it.
 
Dont disparage your TV because it's not OLED. Every technology has its place though with marketing you would never know that.

By nature your LED (aka led) will be a brighter picture no matter the price range. (in most cases)
OLED in the lower price range in most cases will not match that brightness. So if you have a bright room OLED can be a disadvantage unless you spend way more, if even then.

Hope you are enjoying it. Keep us up to date how you make out with it.

Appreciate the reply! As I'm a bit of a tech nerd, I'm fully aware that most entry-level OLED sets are unable to match today's mid-range QLED sets when it comes to measured nits.

For reference, my old Vizio topped out at 450 nits, whereas this U6GR hits almost 850 nits in HDR mode. Even in SDR, being I watch 95% of the time after sunset, I'm finding the Hisense to be TOO bright. I have it in Movie mode, set to the 2nd highest "brightness" mode, with the backlight down around the 70ish mark just to be able to watch without squinting.

That being said: when watching UHD Blu-Ray's at full resolution, the quality is INCREDIBLE.
 
Yes our now few years Sony x900h or something like that was a bit pricey compared to TVs today. Picture is important to us for our main TV, we enjoy movies. We also have a very bright room, even if rarely do we ever watch TV daytime, there will be a handful of events over a years time, maybe some sporting event/Olympics ect that we may watch during the day.
Anyway, back then the Sony had well reviewed brightness, upscaling, local dimming = HDR so fit the bill for us. Meaning close to OLED picture but higher brightness which we needed. Very happy with it, when we first got it, though used to it now the picture at times was 3d like, very impressed.
Before that TV was a 1080p for a short period of time and before that was a Pani 58 inch Plasma. I know some people still love plasma and back in those days it was great, but hands down picture quality and brightness is blown away by the Sony, granted maybe more noticeable to us because of our room.

We have a Sony 4k Blu ray, always preferred renting Redbox until recently some of the streaming 4k (as claimed) is to us just as good. Frustrating that we could never rent 4k movies, though the standard Blu Ray was always great, for a rare special movie or two we would buy the 4k version if anything to see the full capabilities of the TV>


Im impressed with your knowledge, though we are in BITOG so I guess I would not be surprised. I dont think I could quote brightness specs, only what I read in reviews before I buy something I make sure it fits our use.
 
I have the same TV only 65 inches, just got it last week.
Where do you guys get the HDR content?

I have been finding some 4k stuff on Youtube, mostly travel footage, or drone footage. Thailand beaches never looked better.
 
I have the same TV only 65 inches, just got it last week.
Where do you guys get the HDR content?

I have been finding some 4k stuff on Youtube, mostly travel footage, or drone footage. Thailand beaches never looked better.
Just plain old HDR or HDR 10+/Dolby Vision? Just about every UHD source has basic HDR baked in, and certain streaming services will have shows or movies with either 10+ or DV.

Mainstream streaming services have beefed up HDR offerings pretty well. Now all I need is uncompressed Atmos...
 
I have the same TV only 65 inches, just got it last week.
Where do you guys get the HDR content?

I have been finding some 4k stuff on Youtube, mostly travel footage, or drone footage. Thailand beaches never looked better.

How are you liking the set so far? Did you adjust the out of the box settings? I HIGHLY recommend starting with these baseline settings from Rtings:

Hisense U6GR picture settings

In regards to HDR content: I use an external Roku Premiere for streaming and a Sony UDP-X800 UHD Blu-Ray player for my physical media, all routed through my Pioneer VSX45 receiver. The Roku can pass DV, however my EARLY model X800 player does not support DV, the updated "M2" model added DV support.

If you really want to test the HDR ability of your new set, I recommend starting with the Rtings settings I mentioned. Once those are dialed in, pull up YouTube from the Roku home page and search for "HDR demo".

I'd love to get your feedback. For the price I paid ($369.99) for the 55" set, I couldn't be more impressed. Do you mind my asking what you picked up the 65" for?
 
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