A 43in screen, Dolby vision and a VA LCD panel for peanuts
4K TV | £229| whf.cm/Hisense_43A6KTUK
There’s nothing deep about the 43A6KTUK’s star attraction; at just £229 for a 43in TV, it represents potentially ridiculously good value for money. Especially when you consider that despite its low price it delivers a native 4K resolution, high dynamic range support including Dolby Vision, AI-powered picture processing and Hisense’s increasingly handy VIDAA smart system.
You don’t need us to tell you that £229 is a puny sum to pay for a 43in 4K HDR TV. Even the recently reviewed Samsung UE43CU8000, a set we also thought was crazily cheap for what it offered, costs £150 more than the 43A6KTUK at the time of writing.
The 43A6KTUK looks perfectly respectable for such a cheap TV. Its frame is impressively thin around its side and top edges, and while its bottom edge is much wider, Hisense has successfully made a feature of this by also making the bottom edge stick out further forward and sideways than the rest of the frame. Its rear is deeper than most TVs we see now at its chunkiest point, making it better suited to being placed in a corner of the room rather than wall mounted.
Inevitably for a price this low, there’s no Quantum Dot colour or local dimming in play. Nor is there any 120Hz or VRR gaming support, since the TV uses only a 60Hz panel, with HDMI ports that have enough bandwidth to support only the HDMI 2.1 format’s eARC and ALLM features.
Happily the 43A6KTUK uses a VA panel lit by LEDs placed directly behind the screen rather than around its edges. VA panels have more limited viewing angles than the rival IPS types of LCD TV, but can control the light they let through better to achieve a (usually) better contrast performance. Similarly, experience suggests that placing LEDs behind a screen rather than around its edges again provides superior light control (with less chance of local light ‘clouding’) – even without any local dimming to help out.
Even more surprisingly for such a cheap TV, the 43A6KTUK carries a couple of bits of picture processing: motion compensation (though oddly this is greyed out with 24p sources), and Hisense’s AI Picture Optimization technology, which attempts to get the best look for each image frame the TV receives – especially when it comes to the tricky business of upscaling HD content to the TV’s native 4K resolution.
