Hisense takes Mini LED to the mid-range with enjoyable results
The 65U7K’s price looks very appealing compared with the costs of this year’s Samsung and Sony Mini LED TVs, undercutting both by hundreds of pounds for the same-sized screens. While build quality is a touch lightweight and plastic-rich compared with more premium rival Mini LED sets, it doesn’t feel flimsy or insubstantial – three sides of the screen frame, at least, are impressively trim, and the centrally mounted curved bar stand you get adds a pleasantly high-end touch.
Be warned, though, that the U7K’s direct lighting system does lead to the TV sticking out quite a bit further at the rear than most of today’s slimline TVs.
With the U7K we get a contrast-rich VA type of Mini LED panel and, for the 65in model at least, what we count to be 384 separately controlled light dimming zones. That’s not a world-beating zone count, but it is more than might reasonably be expected for such a relatively affordable Mini LED TV. The lighting system is driven by Hisense’s Hi-View processing – an AI-bolstered system that is also responsible for the U7K’s noise reduction, motion enhancement and 4K upscaling processing systems, as well as marshalling the set’s Quantum Dot colour system, which Hisense claims is capable of serving up a billion colours.
As with almost any TV these days, the U7K is able to apply its upmarket lighting system to high dynamic range content made in the HDR10 and HLG formats. Much more unusually, though, it can also play not only both of the premium HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats, with their extra scene by scene picture information, but also the Adaptive and IQ versions respectively of these advanced formats, where they adapt their images to ambient room conditions. This means that the U7K is equipped to receive the best version of any content you pipe into it.
Two of the set’s four HDMIs can take in 4K at 120Hz frame rates (144Hz is also possible), as well as supporting VRR and ALLM. The VRR coverage extends to the AMD FreeSync Premium system available on the Xbox Series X, and the U7K has a Dolby Vision game mode that works right up to 4K/120Hz. The U7K takes just 13.1ms to render 60Hz graphics – a low enough number to make it hard for you to blame screen lag for poor Call Of Duty performance.
