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Rating:

8/10

When does a midrange TV become a premium one? Hisense’s latest U7 model, the U7SG, certainly looks the part. Its new industrial stand and anti-reflective matte screen are reminiscent of Samsung’s top-shelf QN90 and S95 TVs, while its mini-LED backlighting is spectacularly bright. It’s fully loaded for gaming, comes in a fleet of sizes (up to 116 inches!), and its snappy Google TV interface is among the best streaming platforms available.

Hisense's U7 is at a bit of a crossroads this year. Hisense’s usual step-up model, the U8, is now the UR8, which hosts the hottest new display tech, RGB LED. It trades regular blue or white mini-LED backlighting for RGB backlights, which means more vibrant colors, higher brightness, and other performance upgrades. We’ll soon find out how much this spanking new tech delivers on its promises—and how much more you’ll pay for it in later models—but the U7SG can’t help but feel some FOMO.

What’s more, the TV doesn't look quite so premium with some testing, with familiar budget flaws like poor side-view performance and other unexpected problems like software that makes challenging scenes look a bit odd in the default settings. Thankfully, the software issues are an easy fix, and the TV’s eye-catching colors and improved image clarity are a treat for most real-world content. As usual, I wouldn’t grab one at full price, but the price should drop soon, making this year’s U7 another solid budget buy.

Setup and Streaming

The base plate of the U7SG’s rugged new stand is heavy. (I dropped a similar piece from Samsung’s QN90 on my foot a few years back, and it left a mark for months.) It adds 10 pounds to the 43.2-pound, 65-inch U7SG I reviewed, and the six-screw assembly takes more patience than last year’s U75QG. But its sturdy hold and clean industrial look are worth it. I was also impressed to see a new, matte-like anti-reflective screen up front, and at the back, two different woofers for solid sound quality, even if I’d prefer a soundbar or speaker system in most scenarios.

Normally, setting up the U7’s Google TV interface would make up for some lost time, but the new Google TV app is less reliable (and more ad-packed) than the old Home app. It simply wouldn’t connect the TV to my phone, so I had to do most of the clicking from its long-wand remote. Even so, I had the system up and running in under 10 minutes, and after adding my G Suite credentials, I was able to access favorites like using my Google Photos as screen savers.

App aside, Hisense’s Google TV skin has continued to improve, and this might be the swiftest version I’ve tested yet. The response is quick, and it’s easy to grab and arrange all your favorite apps, especially if you’ve already used Google TV in the past. Apart from one odd moment where the TV couldn’t find my network, I had zero streaming flubs over weeks.

Picture Mode Pointers

Setting up the picture modes takes a bit more time, and not just because Hisense supports every major flavor of HDR (high dynamic range), including the basic HDR10, and the fancier HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats to showcase the brightest and darkest onscreen images. Film-forward modes like Theater Night, Theater Day, and Filmmaker are your best bets for an accurate picture.

I used Filmmaker for older SDR (standard dynamic range) video with a slight boost to the backlight. (You can brighten things further with the Peak Brightness setting.) I used the same mode for HDR10 and HDR10+, though here’s where I found the TV’s first picture oddities. Local Dimming, which is designed to reduce backlight bleed around bright objects on dark backgrounds, is set to High by default. That looks good in most scenes, but it can create a strange highlight around images on gray backgrounds. If you’re seeing this effect, set Local Dimming to Low to fix it.

Another bizarre issue came with the U7SG’s Dynamic Tone Mapping in HDR10. The common setting is generally designed to adjust your TV’s capabilities to HDR video in real time. Hisense sets it to “Details Preferred” by default. It's meant to optimize brightness and contrast on a frame-by-frame basis, but it made my Mad Max: Fury Road 4K Blu-ray look stiff and stilted—almost like it was animated, and not live action. It’s easy enough to turn off, but it's something that a videophile would definitely notice.

There's no such issue for Dolby Vision, the most prominent HDR format for streaming video. I recommend Dolby Vision Dark for most content, or Dolby Vision IQ for particularly dark scenes, though you’ll want to turn off the motion smoothing under Clarity.

This year’s U7 is once again primed for gaming fans, with a high variable refresh rate (VRR) of up to 165 Hz at 4K resolution. That’s enough to eliminate jerky motion in fast-paced games with gaming PCs, and more than enough for more casual gamers with a PS5, like me. Games look impressive by default, and you can adjust multiple settings on the fly with the gaming bar. Best of all, you don’t have to worry about running out of ports, thanks to support for the latest gaming features across all four HDMI ports.

Measured Brightness

Even as I’ve gotten spoiled by the quality of modern budget TVs, mainly from Hisense and fellow Chinese rival TCL, the U7SG can dazzle when it wants to, especially with high-quality videos. Its clarity has improved this year—you can really see Maui’s intricately dimpled skin in Moana as the film zooms in on his tattoos. Colors can look a little bland in basic fare like sitcoms, but they really pop in HDR shows and movies, from Moana’s violet sunsets to the aqua-backed coral gardens of Netflix’s Our Planet or the stark blues and yellows that define Mad Max: Fury Road.

Unlike previous years in what TV nerds like me call the “brightness wars,” the U7SG doesn’t outblast its predecessor, but it's not a problem. It gets around three times as bright as anything you can stream (which is naturally capped due to compression), and has enough firepower for all but the flashiest 4K HDR Blu-rays. Its color processing shows a little more restraint than in previous models. It's not quite what I'd call “accurate to the director’s intent,” like the best TVs I test, but it does keep itself from blasting your eyeballs most of the time.

The high brightness is matched by deep black levels, without much of the “blooming” or “haloing” around bright objects that can dilute the contrast of many budget-friendly TVs. It’s not as striking as OLED TVs, which can control each of their millions of pixels on demand, but it’ll wow you in deep space scenes just the same. I was pleased that the TV’s odd local dimming issue didn’t crop up in real-world content, but the picture does tend to flatten shadows in dark scenes more than expected, even as the matte-like screen does a good job keeping reflections at bay.

There are some other notable flaws. Moving off to the TV’s side in my easy chair led to dimmer colors, washed-out contrast between the brightest and darkest images, and uneven backlighting, aka the “dirty-screen effect.” That stood out most in the green backdrop of the Masters on Sunday as Rory McIlroy held on for the win. It wasn't an issue when viewing head-on, but even then, I noticed some dingy yellow lines along the screen's left and right sides with light backgrounds. (I may not have noticed them much if I hadn't been bombarding this TV with test content first.)

The U7SG still doesn't feel quite like a premium model. But it's a very clear, bright TV, and will feel more like it's worth the money once RGB shows up on other Hisense models and the price on this one drops. If you want something brighter than a similarly priced OLED like the LG B5, the U7 is a great buy and has a few good upgrades over last year's U75QG.

We’ll know more about the 2026 TV landscape once the new RGB TVs have landed, but if you need a powerful, classy-looking TV before then, the U7SG should be on your list.