Hisense - 55" Class U8 Series Mini-LED QLED UHD 4K HDR Smart Google TV (2025)

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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Great picture quality

  • Incentivized
  • Verified Purchaser
  • Owned for 1 week

  I am happy with my TCL 55 TV. The picture quality and the sound are surprisingly very good.it’s bright enough for any room. the overall performance is more than I expected. Honestly for 500 dollars I don’t think you’ll find better TV. Definitely worth it

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  Posted 5 days ago by JoelC

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Great screen, latest Google TV interface

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 50 Contributor

  This TV has an excellent screen: QLED with mini-LED backlighting, supports adaptive Dolby Vision, which adapts to the lighting in the room. It also supports 165 Hz refresh rates to use with gaming PCs. The TV is 2 inches thick without the base and has a subwoofer on the back. Sounds great mounted on the wall. The front has a very thin frame with a small lip on the bottom that's about half-inch. It also has a very thin controls bar in the bottom-center of the TV that holds the IR receiver, mics, mic switch and a single control button. What's innovative in this new model is that the back of the TV is completely flat. Other TVs would have a curved back to make it look thinner, but it can actually be a few inches deep. This rearranges all internal components to make its back flat, at just two inches thick (without the pedestal) and it uses the sides for additional side-firing speakers. This makes the internal speakers sound better. The pedestal base is a black metal with a plastic on the back, which I didn't use because it's mounted on the wall. The base is very spartan, and very solidly built. The remote control is long, plastic imitating gray metal, that looks good, it uses IR and Bluetooth for fast response and doesn't need to be pointed to the TV and has a mic for Google Voice. The TV uses two AAA batteries, and works with NiMH rechargeables (Generic AAA batteries are included). The TV also has a microphone array so one can say 'Hey Google' without using the remote. This can be disabled but the TV will have a bright orange light indicating so when the physical mic disable switch is on. If this bothers you, like it happened to me, enable the TV mic but disable every use of it in the TV settings. Google TV is much improved from the older TVs we have. This runs Android 14. I notice it's a lot more responsive than older models we use. When integrated with Google Home, the Google Home app can be used as a remote control, and the TV itself has links to control things around the house, show compatible cameras on-screen and so on. It also supports Amazon Alexa integrations and works with Apple Home and AirPlay 2. Both worked very well for me. We have both Apple and Android devices both Airplay and Google Cast work reliably. It also has the option of setting up as a more basic TV with a simplified Google TV interface, which I prefer as it shows less advertisements and doesn't show the watch history up front. I have to say, the image quality improved significantly compared to a TV from years past. Older Google TVs we used were a bit glitchy here and there. This TV has no issues, it's interface is the smoothest I've seen in a Google TV. Note that the TV itself has no controls, except for a single power button that can also change the input modes. This is a departure from older TVs that had at list a control pad and handful of buttons on its sides, but not this one, just a single button on the TV itself. The remote control however works very well. As for video connectors, there are HDMI, all 4K capable and one with eARC support. As a special feature, this TV also has an USB-C connector that supports DisplayPort. This is meant to be used in gaming setups, and can be used to connect to a computer, and supports variable refresh rates (FreeSync) up to 165 Hz, which I confirmed with a laptop. This TV is meant for games as well. The best thing on this TV is the screen, which to me is on par with other top brands. It's as good as it gets on LED TVs. This is a MiniLED that can get very bright, and has 5000 zones on the back, so very dark scenes or things like closing titles look great here with no blooming and no light leaks. As of now, this is within the most advanced LED TVs. HDR / Dolby Vision content looks fantastic here. Warranty is two years. Overall, fantastic TV. Impressed by details like the flat back, side-firing speakers, USB-C connector, very stable Google TV platform, and among the best LED class screens.

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  Posted 1 month ago by emiliosic

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Fantastic Picture & Sound with Minor Annoyances

  • Tech Insider Network Member

  The Hisense U8 TV is absolutely one of the best-looking TVs I’ve ever owned. I can confidently say that I’m happy with this TV and would recommend it to others. That said, I do have several minor quibbles with it, that may or may not add up to you considering a different purchase. Unboxing the TV wasn’t difficult, but it wasn’t the easiest experience either. Opening the box you are met with a taped instruction guide on how to get the stand onto the TV. This is also inside the user guide. However, the hardest part for my partner and I in this process and not mentioned in either setup instructions was how to just remove the unit from the box itself. That alone was nerve wracking as there are many warnings about how not to touch the TV. Once the TV was removed from the box and placed on the temporary stands you use with the packaging materials, the rest of the process was easy. Both the TV is surprisingly heavy at about 40 pounds, along with the stand itself adding another 12. It’s nothing excessive for two adults, but the TV was far heavier than I expected coming from my previous TCL TV. I’m not upset at it being heavy – it certainly doesn’t feel or look cheap. The stand being a giant solid metal piece was welcome. It attaches to the TV with multiple connection points and feels incredibly held on and solid – something I want when putting this on a taller stand. The size of the TV itself is a bit larger, depth-wise, and that’s to accommodate the built in audio – which, while it does sound good, I didn’t dive too much into as I have an external soundbar. The rest of the physical setup involved plugging in the power cable on the right side of the TV and 3 components (XBOX, Nintendo Switch, and a soundbar) to the three HDMI ports. Here I’m going to get a little nitpicky. I could be wrong here, but the detachable power cable’s connection into the TV is type I’ve not seen. I’m not sure if it’s proprietary, but it was new to me and I’m not a fan of detachable cables that could get lost not being easily replaceable. As for the ports, I find that in 2025 only 3 HDMI ports are the bare minimum number that should be on a television. Especially since one of them is the eARC, or audio return channel, the one you’ll need to connect to for a soundbar or external A/V system. If you’re then connecting game consoles or a blu-ray player, you’re quickly running out of HDMI ports. If, however, your plans for this TV include only watching streaming channels and don’t need to connect other devices, you’ll be just fine. In regard to other ports, I’m impressed: there’s TWO USB ports, an 3.5mm audio input and output for headphones, coaxial for antenna, digital audio out (also for soundbars) AND a USB-C DisplayPort for PC connections. It’s just a shame there couldn’t be one or two more HDMI ports. Turning the TV on for the first time there were no issues with initialization. Not only did the TV immediately connect to my soundbar via the HDMI eARC connection, but my Google Pixel 9 phone instantly saw the TV and prompted me through the steps to initialize. This included connecting to WiFi, adding my Google account, selecting apps to install off the bat, and doing a firmware update. This brings us to the TV software, which is Google TV. It’s…. fine. All our TVs for a number of years have been running Roku software, either natively or via add-on. While I was preparing for a difference, I did find it jarring. Google’s software, comparatively, is very modern and new looking. It is also very big on a tailored experience, showing you things on the various services you’ve told it you subscribe to. While Roku does this, too, the main screen are your streaming service apps, front and center, and easily accessible. You can adjust their sizing and see all apps at once on a grid. On Google TV, you have to scroll down through two or three rows of suggestions before you find your apps – and then all of them are displayed on a single line you must scroll left and right through. You can reorder this, but you can’t display it any differently than a very long row of applications. The suggestions are great… but they don’t show from all my streaming services or all the shows I’m currently watching. It's a mix of shows from various networks, YouTube, and shows I may or may not have ever shown interest in. While I love how it looks, I just want access to my various streaming applications as quickly as possible without having to scroll through all of them to even see them all. I do appreciate that there’s a great and many settings to select from, but even that seems confusing. There’s a settings button and a menu button on the remote. The settings button brings up a non-customizable quick menu. From there you can access a lot of basic settings for sound, picture, Bluetooth and even a screensaver. You can also go from there to the full settings screen to access even more. The menu button brings up a different menu, a customizable bar across the bottom of the screen with access to…. More quick settings. I can’t say for certain, but it feels like pop up settings menu may be built into the Google TV software and another is specially designed by Hisense themselves, but all it does is create confusion. I’m not even sure all the settings between the two are the same. The menu button brings up, when I’m using my XBOX, and whole secondary menu bar specific for game mode settings. This looks great and has many options, but I’m nearly positive that it contains even more settings that, best I can tell, aren’t accessible anywhere else. While I doubt most folks will need to access any of the settings information frequently, that makes it even more confusing when you do to figure out how and where to go to get what you need. Speaking of buttons, I also must talk about the remote. I love that it’s backlit. That’s a little, unexpected feature that goes a long way. Not all buttons light up, but enough to get the job done. However, the rest of the remote my partner and I both find to me incredibly frustrating. Size wise, this may be polarizing, but I don’t want a large remote. A quarter of the remote’s length is unused space. While I appreciate there’s a customizable button, I don’t care about the instant buttons to services that you may or may not use. I previously touched upon the confusion of both a settings button and menu button that brings up settings in a different way. I also find the dedicated Google account button and live channels button unnecessary. And, this is 100% personal preference, but I question in 2025 a remote with AA batteries not being rechargeable. However, my biggest gripe about this remote are the navigation buttons, or rather, wheel. The wheel encapsulates the “OK” button, your main selection button. The wheel doesn’t spin; it’s just your standard up/down/left/right buttons. However, it’s a different material from the other buttons, a ribbed metallic button that just feels uncomfortable to my fingers. More egregiously, this wheel serves as your only navigation aid. There are no dedicated forward/backward buttons. This also means that how it works is app dependent. In some cases, pressing left or right on the wheel moves you in ten second increments. Some apps clicking it once enables fast forwarding/reversing. And on some you need to HOLD IT DOWN to start scrolling through your media. Finally, there’s a back button that most Google TV screens and app require you use to move through navigation that isn’t in a more prominent space for how often you use it. If this sounds like I really harped on a bunch of minor negative points, it’s because I have. The screen is amazing – hands down. I can’t say enough about it. This isn’t my main TV, but I find myself wanting to watch this one more because of the fantastic picture quality. The sound is very good for built-in TV sound. If I didn’t have a sound bar already, I’d be incredibly happy with it. However, all the minor things add up enough to hamper my enjoyment of an otherwise amazing television and serve as the primary reason I cannot give it full stars. There’s nothing outwardly bad about these small quibbles, but it does mar and otherwise excellent experience when things like the remote buttons frustrate you regularly and the software is clearly designed not for how you want to view television, but how Google says you should be viewing television. Bottom line, if you’re looking for a new TV with fantastic picture and sound and wont’ be irked by anything I mentioned above, you’re going to love this TV.

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  Posted 1 month ago by Eric