Hisense U7SG TV Review (2026): Better Design, Great Value | WIRED

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Rating:8/10

Open rating explainerInformation

WIRED

Premium upgraded stand and anti-reflective screen. Lots of brightness and deep black levels. Improved image processing for impressive detail. Vibrant colors, especially with high-quality video. Excellent gaming support. Snappy Google TV interface. Solid sound quality.

TIRED

Middling off-angle performance. Default settings on picture modes look weird. Better TVs are coming soon.

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

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

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

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

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