Hisense UXN (110UXN) review: Say hello to the next generation of televisions

When the super high-specification 110in Hisense UXN was unveiled at CES 2024, I couldn’t help but think it was destined to be just another attention grabber that wouldn’t end up getting past the prototype stage.

Hisense may have taken its time, but it has now launched the UXN TV range, which includes the jaw-dropping 110in flagship I’ve been lucky enough to live with for this review. It’s the most spectacular TV I’ve ever spent time with, but unless you’ve got a spare £20,000 lying around and an enormous living space in which to house it, the UXN will only ever be a pipe dream.

Hisense UXN review: Key specifications

Screen sizes available (varies by territory): 75in 75UXN, 85in 85UXN, 98in 98UXN, 110in 110UXN
Panel type: Quantum Dot Mini LED with local dimming
Resolution: 4K/UHD (3,840 x 2,160)
Refresh rate: 144Hz
HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision, HDR10+
Audio enhancements: Dolby Atmos playback, DTS:X, 4.2.2-channel playback, Hi-Concerto sound sharing with Hisense soundbars, AI Sound processing with Dialogue Clarity enhancer and AI scenario optimizer
HDMI inputs: 2 x HDMI 2.1 (4K/144Hz), 2 x HDMI 2.0 (4K/60Hz) 
Freeview Play compatibility: Yes
Tuners: Terrestrial Freeview HD
Gaming features: ALLM, 4K/144Hz, VRR (AMD Freesync Premium Pro), Dolby Vision Game mode
Wireless connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, Apple Airplay, Anyview Cast, DLNA, Apple Home
Smart assistants: Amazon Alexa
Smart platform: VIDAA U 7.6

Hisense UXN review: What you need to know

Different sizes of UXN screens have been promised for different international territories. But note, the variations in specification between the sizes are so extreme that it wouldn’t be safe to assume that the performance of the 110UXN can be taken as representative of the performance of the other sizes.

While all UXNs use Mini LEDs, thousands of local dimming zones and quantum dot colours, the 110UXN’s colossal 110in screen size goes way beyond anything claimed by its smaller siblings. Brightness is stated at 10,000 nits and there are an incredible 40,000 separate local dimming zones all driven by a new, heavily AI-infused Hi-View Engine X processor. These sorts of numbers go way beyond the capabilities of any other TV I’ve seen from any other brand before.

Hisense UXN review: Price and competition

The 110UXN goes for £19,999 in the UK. While this wouldn’t have seemed out of the way for such a huge TV as recently as a couple of years ago, it does look like a serious chunk of change by the standards of a king-sized TV market today where 98-100in TVs now go for less than £2,000. It’s also a world away from the aggressive pricing we typically see from Hisense; this is very much a statement product designed to show it’s not just a budget brand.

The main direct high-end competition for the 110UXN comes from TCL’s even bigger, 115in X955K, which claims to provide more than 20,000 local dimming zones and 5,000 nits of brightness but costs £25,000. Or if you just want a good quality massive screen for a fraction of the 110UXN’s price, Hisense has the 100E7NQTUK (£1,999) and 100E77NQT Pro (£1,999), with the latter featuring a more premium, game-friendly panel than the non-Pro mode.

I only recently reviewed TCL’s 98in Q9BK, too, which delivers more than 1,500 dimming zones, Mini LED lighting and a peak brightness of 2,100 nits for £3,250.

Hisense UXN review: Design, connections and control

Viewed head-on, the only really major design feature of the 110UXN is how colossal its screen is. The TCL 98in 98Q9BK I reviewed suddenly feels like small fry. The 110in screen makes a really strong case for seeing the UXN as an alternative to a high-quality projector. An alternative capable of pumping out levels of HDR-friendly brightness even the most expensive projector can only dream about.

The screen sits on a pair of feet attached under each corner if you’re not wall-mounting it. These are nothing special aesthetically, but their blade styling means you hardly see them when you’re looking at the screen straight on. The UXN design is more stylish down its sides, where you can find some fancy embossed logos and a curved, grilled tube set back from chamfered outer edges within which the TV’s side-firing speakers lie.

The set’s rear, meanwhile, sticks out less than you might expect for such a huge, back-lit TV, and boasts a couple of dual-driver subwoofer arrays set within the top half of its flat, stripe-etched back panel.

The UXN’x connections are a slightly mixed bag for a £20,000 TV in that only two of its four HDMIs can handle 4K/120Hz with variable refresh rate gaming feeds. The other two top out at 60Hz. I guess not many people will want to attach three 4K/120Hz capable devices at once to a TV, though – and at least the two high-bandwidth HDMIs can stretch to 144Hz if you have a PC capable of outputting that.

There are also USB ports for direct multimedia playback, tuner inputs and the now essential wireless options of Wi-Fi with DLNA support and Bluetooth (including support for Apple Airplay).

The UXN TVs are controlled by a premium remote control which features a solar panel on its bottom end. Otherwise, though, the layout of the remote is fairly standard, complete with a full set of numerical keys, rather than being the premium feeling, stripped-back design I might have hoped for on such a high-end TV.

Hisense UXN review: Smart TV platform

While the UXN uses Google TV smarts in the US, Hisense has gone with its own VIDAA smart system in the UK system. This makes perfect sense as VIDAA avoids Google’s issues with onboarding some of the UK’s most popular terrestrial broadcaster catch-up apps.

The UXN goes the extra mile in the UK by including support for both the Freeview Play catch-up TV service umbrella app and the new Freely service, via which you can watch live streamed versions of many of the UK’s main terrestrial broadcast channels.

Hisense UXN review: Image quality

While the UXN, especially the 110UXN, is emphatically designed to excel with 4K HDR images, they also adapt surprisingly well to HD and SDR.

Multiple greyscale and colour measurements taken using Portrait Display’s Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and a high-end Klein light meter show the 110UXN consistently managing to stay below the Delta E error threshold of three. This threshold is where it’s thought that the human eye might see a difference between the TV’s pictures and established SDR video standards.

This is genuinely a remarkable act of discipline for a TV capable of pushing pictures to the sort of extremes the 110UXN can. Even its white peak measurement of 299cd/m² for SDR in Filmmaker Mode tracks very close to the sort of light levels the SDR standard is designed to work to, showing almost unbelievable restraint on Hisense’s part given the 10,000 nits claimed to be at the 110UXN’s disposal.

The result is remarkably detailed and nuanced. Filmmaker Mode produces an especially balanced picture where no colours stand out too much, no shadow detail goes unshown, no subtle skin tone shift, no background blend becomes blotchy or striped and no dark scene looks too bright or noisy. Black levels are also remarkably good; deep, rich and impressively free of obvious backlight blooming issues.

Seeing this level of balance and finesse on a screen this big reminds you that SDR when done right can still be a thing of beauty, even in today’s brave new HDR world.

If you’re not watching in a pretty dark room, though, or you’re motivated more by seeing what your ultra-expensive TV can do with the brakes off than you are by accuracy, then the 110UXN also has your back with its Standard picture preset. This ups the white brightness to a peak of well over 2,000cd/m², instantly giving SDR sources much more impact and punch, while also substantially increasing the colour gamut and saturation levels. This ensures that the extra brightness is accompanied by a commensurate increase in colour volume, so that colours don’t start to look thin or washed out.

Surprisingly, Hisense’s new AI picture processing system can achieve this substantial Standard mode increase in vibrancy and contrast without going as far off-piste when it comes to greyscale and colour standards as you might expect. Calman Ultimate measurements find an average Delta E 2000 error of just 1.6 in our multipoint greyscale test. Gamut, saturation sweep and colour checker tests recorded quite respectable average errors of between 5.2 and 6.

The 110UXN’s upscaling of HD sources is also something of a revelation for Hisense. There would be no hiding place on a screen as big as this for any noise exaggerations, misplaced colours, haloing around hard lines or processing lag caused by the upscaling engine, but I didn’t find myself troubled by any such woes. Leaving me free to be massively impressed by how dense, detailed and above all clean HD looks on the 110UXN.

In the end, while even the Standard mode’s portrayal of SDR barely scratches the surface of what the 110UXN can do, it’s encouraging to see Hisense taking its SDR duties so seriously rather than just falling into show-off mode.

Hisense UXN review: HDR image quality

Having said what I just said, as a TV technology fan I was very much up for seeing the 110UXN’s exclusive claimed 10,000 nits of brightness, 40,000 dimming zones and quantum dot colours fully unleashed on HDR content. And I have to say that with a caveat or two, it didn’t let me down.

First, though, I need to get into a strange quirk of Hisense’s brightness claims. To get 10,000 nits out of the screen (actually measured for a few seconds to more than 11,500cd/m² on a 5% of screen area test window) you first have to turn off all of the screen’s eco-based backlight limiters, and then head into the TV’s AI menus and activate a feature called AI Brightness Burst. Without this in play, the 110UXN tops out at (a still impressive) 6,000cd/m².

Initially, I found it peculiar that this Brightness Burst feature isn’t on by default with any of the UXN’s picture presets. Over time, though, it struck me that while it does deliver a breathtaking extra level of HDR intensity to small bright highlights and makes the TV look spectacular in a very bright environment, it can feel a bit too much for regular viewing conditions. But if you want to show off to your friends, yes, the sense of pure spectacle the Burst feature adds is truly unprecedented.

Even with Brightness Burst off, the insanely high-end toolset the 110UXN has at its disposal helps it deliver HDR pictures that are consistently the most explosively bright and colourful images I’ve ever seen outside of a prototype demo room.

Colour saturations across the board are so dazzlingly vibrant that it almost feels like they should be illegal. But at the same time, under the watchful eye of Hisense’s remarkably talented new premium video processor, colours retain enough subtlety of blend and tone and enough awareness of how they’re working in the context of the rest of the image to never look cartoonish or flat.

On the contrary, the consistent sharpness and precision achieved by the 110UXN’s processor, especially its Super Resolution feature, helps pictures achieve a crispness and three-dimensionality that instantly crushes doubts raised during my experience with TCL’s 98Q9BK of whether 4K can scale up to such huge screen sizes without becoming a bit soft. To underscore what I’m saying here, it’s hard to overstate just how astonishingly good the 110UXN looks with the majority of whatever HDR content you feed it. Especially if what you’re feeding it has been mastered in Dolby Vision (though this isn’t meant to suggest the 110UXN’s dynamic tone mapping system with regular HDR10 footage is anything less than excellent).

The screen’s colours and contrast hold up surprisingly well if viewed from quite a wide angle off-axis, and there’s no increase in clouding or colour desaturation in the image’s corners if you’re sitting unhealthily (but enjoyably) close to the screen.

While I suspect many 110UXN owners will find it hard to resist the dazzling guilty pleasures of the Standard mode with HDR content, it’s worth saying that both its HDR Movie and HDR Filmmaker Mode settings offer strong options for AV fans seeking a more controlled and consistently immersive experience. Delta E errors in Filmmaker Mode average a respectable 5 to 7 for colour and greyscale tests, while EOTF HDR curve tracking is strikingly good. Surprisingly, the 110UXN measures smaller Delta E errors if you use its more in-your-face Standard preset.

Hisense’s screen can also, according to the Calman Ultimate analysis software, cover an impressive 97.5% of the UHDA-P3 colour spectrum used for mastering most HDR content.

The worry with an LED screen as bright as the 110UXN will always be whether or not it has the backlight control to deliver convincing, consistent black colours alongside all that light. And it’s here that things get a little complicated.

I should say right away that usually the processor tasked with driving all those separate zones does a phenomenal job of ensuring that black areas of the picture look black, and that bright highlights are neither surrounded by blindingly obvious backlight haloes nor heavily dimmed down to avoid such backlight haloes.

Nor is there typically any glaring stability in the backlighting as bright objects move around against dark backdrops, or between cuts from blazingly bright to seriously dark shots. However, with shots where a mostly very dark area contains a lot of subtle shadow detail and/or a few small bright highlights, the picture can start to look a bit hazy and uneven. This general cloudiness is preferable to very obvious and defined pools of light around bright objects that can happen with aggressive local dimming systems, but it can look a little unnatural all the same.

There can also be faint leaks of backlight around bright objects into the black bars above and below ultra-widescreen content – something I’d hoped 40,000 dimming zones might have been able to avoid.

At this point, I need to report that the 110UXN uses an IPS LCD panel rather than a VA one. This matters because while IPS panels typically produce wider effective viewing angles, they also struggle to produce contrast as well as VA TVs do. I can understand why Hisense went the IPS route; TVs like the 110UXN have the potential to be housed in extremely large rooms with a wide array of viewing positions, and it avoids the previously mentioned issue of potential angle-based colour and contrast fade in a big TV’s corners. But I would have loved to see how the 110UXN might have looked with a VA panel inside it.

A key point to add here, though, is that you’re much less likely to notice the slight haziness if you’re watching the 110UXN in a moderately bright room. Plus it seems to appear less often and less noticeably with Dolby Vision sources.

As mentioned earlier, there can also be a little clipping of detail in bright HDR areas, and sometimes the picture with HDR10 sources can make bright skin tones look slightly peaky. I also noticed the TV leaned a little too bright in dark scenes, bringing out slightly too much background noise and picture information.

Overall, though, the 110UXN remains the most spectacular TV I’ve ever seen. And for the most part, the spectacle makes the handful of niggles almost impossible to see unless you go looking for them.

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Hisense UXN review: Gaming

Gaming at the sheer scale made possible by the UXNs, especially the 110in screen, is an epic experience that once enjoyed is hard to leave behind.

Richly detailed game worlds like the Viking England of Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla or the gorgeous castle and environs of Hogwarts Legacy are irresistible once you’re able to experience them essentially life-sized. I was pleasantly surprised by how responsive (even though 30ms of lag in 60Hz mode isn’t the lowest in the TV world) the screen felt with reaction-based shooters like Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6. Especially with 120Hz titles.

Yes, pro gamers will always want to stick with their small, ultra-fast response monitors so that they can keep their reaction times to the lowest possible. For most ordinary gaming folk, though, the immersive qualities of seeing today’s 4K HDR game graphics writ so large, so bright, so sharp and so colourful as they are on the UXN is nothing short of incredible.

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Hisense UXN review: Sound quality

The Hisense UXN I tested produced a big enough sound to do justice to the epic scale of its pictures – especially with Dolby Atmos mixes. The multi-speaker array casts forth a gigantic wall of sound that spreads far beyond the TV’s left, right and (thanks to the integrated up-firing speakers) top edges, creating a dynamic, spacious, detailed sound stage that manages to expand the already grandiose scale of your viewing experience.

The bass from the twin dual woofers is ever present and reasonably deep, meanwhile, and doesn’t distort or fall away under pressure. In a perfect world, the sound would maybe have an extra 10% pure power to handle the film world’s most dense soundtrack moments.

Even as it stands, though, the 110UXN’s audio manages to sound like it’s coming from a TV that costs £20,000. And you can’t reasonably ask for more than that.

Hisense UXN review: Verdict

The Hisense UXN – specifically the 110UXN flagship I tested – is hands down the most spectacular TV I’ve ever spent quality time with. So impressive and premium are most aspects of its performance, that it’s hard to believe you can actually buy it.

The use of an IPS panel introduces a little controversy and some occasional HDR haziness to the otherwise jaw-dropping show, and I feel duty-bound to say that Hisense does some excellent though much less bright and colourful 100in TVs for a fraction of the £20,000 you need for the 110UXN star model. As a result, it only gets a Recommended award rather than our top honours.

You can easily set your room up to minimise the IPS issues, though, leaving you gawping agog at an epic TV that not only rewrites the big-screen TV rulebook but also bathes Hisense in a whole new high-end light.