I’ve chronicled my and the wider What Hi-Fi? home cinema team’s ongoing quest to find an excellent cheap TV for serious movie fans on a tight budget for well over two years now.
And while I’m yet to find that diamond in the rough that fully delivers in all the areas we care about – picture accuracy, audio quality, app support, gaming performance and value for money – this week I and the team finished testing one set that came very close. Specifically, we published our Hisense U7N review.
With the set winning a solid four, not five, star rating, you may be asking, “why are you recommending it so highly?” Here the answer is simple, at the moment the cheap and lower end of the mid-range TV market is going through a slump and nearly all the sets we test this price come with some serious compromises, and at times outright flaws.
That’s why if you jump over to our reviews section you’ll see a swathe of three-star ratings for the latest batch of affordable sets we've reviewed. Even those good enough to make it into our best Mini LED TV guide have four star ratings.
And having compared the U7N to key rivals head-to-head in our dedicated viewing rooms, we can safely confirm it deserves a place among these sets and the top performer you’ll find at its current price. Which is why we’re now listing it as the best value Mini LED in our guide. That's an impressive achievement as it makes the U7N the first new set to make the cut since we last updated our advice in September 2024.
The 65-inch model I helped test, currently retails for as little as £899/$799 on average, making it solid mid-range option and well below what you’d pay for a 65-inch OLED or flagship Mini LED.
For the money you get a good value Mini LED that’s a clear step up on nearly all the traditional LCD TV’s we’ve reviewed over the past 12 months. Whether it was the bright desert dunes of playing off our 4K Blu-ray of Top Gun: Maverick or the grim futuristic cityscapes of Blade Runner 2049 the TV delivered a decent performance with natural skin tones and generally authentic colours.
As we said in our Hisense U7N review:
“The Hisense U7N is a very good value Mini LED TV that will tick all the right boxes for most people. The Mini LED set offers solid picture quality in most instances – as long as you take the time to tweak its settings. Though its blacks aren’t perfect, its solid dimming zone control lets it throw up a nicely three-dimensional, solid-looking picture that is one of the best you’ll find on a set at this price.”
The only reason it’s not a perfect five-star rating is that, like nearly all the Mini LEDs we test, it can occasionally suffer from backlight blooming. This was particularly noticeable during scenes that had white text overlaying a pitch black background. It also doesn’t go quite as bright as some rivals, including the TCL C855K we tested it against (full review incoming). But the trade off there is that these sets struggle in other areas, including light control. So in my and the team's mind, it is the best holistic option right now.
But, for buyers that can wait, there’s the looming threat of the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED, which myself and the team are currently testing and is a direct rival to the U7N, retailing for an equivalent £949 / $959. If that performs well the U7N’s time in the sun could be short. But, until we finish our Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED the U7N remains the best value Mini LED we currently recommend to movie fans that care about authentic picture quality.
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