Review: Hisense 85UXKQ LCD LED TV

The device stands on two slim but very deep feet. You mount them either at the end of the device or in the middle. The latter position is useful if your TV cabinet is not wide enough.

On the Home screen, there is a significant space at the top reserved for a carousel of sponsored content. The center of the screen features your personal row of apps, which can accommodate up to twenty-five apps, with twelve visible at once. The left side of the screen has icons for account, search function, notifications, inputs, and settings. As you scroll down, the apps slide up, and recommendations for the selected app appear if they are available. The recommendations further down are organized by app, and they cannot be changed. Hisense considers the Home screen as an entrance because streaming is becoming increasingly important. If you press the input key, the Home Screen will appear at the top as the first option, although this feature seems redundant since the remote control will always have a Home button. Hisense offers various well-organized settings, and navigation is smooth.

Remote control

The remote control is made of a small alloy and has an elegant design that makes it convenient to use. Although the keys are compact, their clear shape makes it easy to avoid pressing the wrong button by touch. The remote features six useful shortcuts to popular streaming services including Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Deezer, and Vidaa TV. This is a solid selection that covers a wide range of entertainment options.

Functions

Vidaa offers a wide range of apps that feature all the important international names. In the Netherlands, you can find NPO, Kijk, NLziet, Videoland, and Viaplay. Unfortunately, in Belgium, Hisense lags behind as there isn’t a single local app available, except for the soon-to-be-introduced VTM Go. However, there is no news about Streamz or VRT Max. VIDAA Free provides free access to movie content and VIDAA TV brings streaming channels together in the same interface as your live TV channels. However, no additional channels have been added yet in Belgium and the Netherlands, so VIDAA TV simply directs you to the live TV channels.

The USB media player supports most of the tested formats, including subtitles and soundtracks (including Dolby Atmos and DTS), but it no longer supports older formats like Divx or Xvid. The TV has a single DVB-T2/C/S2 tuner and one CI+ slot, and you can record to external USB media.

Hisense 85UXKQ – Image Processing

The overall results are good, but there is still room for improvement. Upscaling, deinterlacing, and noise suppression performed well. The older images were polished and presented nicely on the screen. However, the upscaling seemed a bit soft and could benefit from extra sharpness, especially at this format. But it’s best not to go overboard, as a maximum of five seems sufficient. The MPEG noise reduction feature had little to no effect, and Hisense should work on improving it. In the first test run, the ‘Smooth image with better gradation’ option had no impact on color bands. However, after installing new software, we were able to achieve the desired result. The lowest setting was enough to eliminate soft forms of banding, but tougher cases like the Game Of Thrones test scene proved too difficult, even at higher settings. The higher settings also resulted in a loss of detail, so it is best to avoid them.

The UXKQ is similar to the U79KQ and the U8KQ, as it also comes with an LCD panel that can use a 240Hz refresh rate. However, this high refresh rate comes at the expense of vertical resolution, which can make fine vertical details less clear. Additionally, some moving objects may have a visible drag mark. While the high refresh rate can be beneficial when it comes to motion sharpness, it does require some compromise. The added value of this feature is relatively small for films and series, but it could be considered for sports. Despite this, the panel has excellent motion sharpness with minimal loss of detail, and moving objects have only a vague soft edge. The motion interpolation feature is also impressive, as it introduces very few image artifacts, and even in ‘Smooth’ mode, it performs exceptionally well. However, the ‘Film’ preset leaves a little too much judder, so ‘Standard’ is the better choice for a better result.

In the mid-tones, the grayscale has a clear red tint, and in the brightest shades, the color temperature is too cool (blue tint). Naturally, this is sometimes visible in predominantly white images. The gamma curve also makes mid tones a bit too bright. Skin tones can sometimes feel a bit pink due to the grayscale. This is not a reference calibration, but the errors only exceed the visible limit. We were very satisfied with the results of most images.

Hisense 85UXKQ – HDR

The 85UXKQ delivers excellent contrast, but can also provide sufficient brightness. The answer: is yes. In HDR Filmmaker mode we measured a peak brightness of 3,478 nits on a 10% window, and just under 1,000 nits (934) on the completely white screen. That is downright impressive, unprecedented even. It must be said that in the first second of such a measurement, you only measure approximately 2,500 nits. But the device also meets and exceeds the specification (2,500 nits).

The color range is wide, 77% Rec.2020 and 99% P3. This should make flashy HDR images possible.

With so much light and color at his disposal, tone mapping seems almost unnecessary. But that wasn’t what we saw. The Filmmaker HDR image mode has a decent calibration. Up to about 30% followed the EOTF neatly, but above that, it was much too bright. With a new firmware, the result was better, but the problem seemed to have shifted. Dark shades are now much too dark, but bright shades neatly follow the EOTF. The gray scale is neutral, which is better than in SDR. The device takes HDR10 metadata into account so that you see almost all white detail. Due to that dark display of the darkest shades, you miss some black detail, but that loss is small. You can partially compensate for this by activating ‘Improved shadow details’. It turned out to be more difficult for dark content because the local dimming made the image very soft. This was noticeable during the very dark beach scene from House of Dragons. Fortunately, scenes like that don’t happen very often, but it was disturbing as if the image had been somewhat erased. Unfortunately, our hope that ‘HDR tone mapping’ would solve those comments turned out to be false. The results varied; sometimes the image gets more contrast and color, but sometimes it resulted in some clipping of white detail or a bit too bright image. Although Hisense gives you very powerful HDR images, we feel it leaves a lot of potential unused.

Hisense 85UXKQ – Sound quality

The audio performance has also been considered. In addition to the regular speakers, the configuration includes upward- and side-facing speakers and a large woofer is in the back. All together good for 82 watts of power. There is support for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.

From that setup, you get a lot of volume and a very good surround experience. In Dolby Atmos tracks we heard a clear height channel, and we had the feeling of being part of the action. The sound is powerful, and the woofer can produce a good amount of bass. The result was also very nice for music. As a negative, we should note that really deep bass sounds also caused a rattling side effect. Either the woofer has reached its limit, or this is due to the back panels that rattle a bit.