A few years ago, Hisense wasn’t really a contender in the premium TV market. It started off as a brand looking to undercut others with cheaper models that weren’t always blessed with the best performance but offered solid value. The Hisense of 2025 is a different beast.
This current version of Hisense is one that wants to put its stamp on the TV market. It doesn’t want to follow or trail in the wake of Samsung or LG. It wants to set the pace in terms of innovation, it wants to be seen as the brand that’s pushing TV experiences forward.
But with that ambition comes higher expectations. Hisense won’t be judged on where it was five years ago – if it wants to be the leader for RGB Mini LED technologies, it can’t stumble or falter – it has to hit the bullseye.
Hisense wants to be the leader in RGB market
RGB Mini LEDs are the latest tech in the TV world. Not unlike F1 revamping its rules and regulations every few years, the introduction of RGB Mini LED has the potential to upset the current hierarchy within the TV market. Get it right, and a TV brand could be on the up and up.
This is something that Samsung has arguably been the best at in the last ten years. By being the first to introduce smart TVs, its push of QLED TVs brought that tech to the mainstream, while it opened up a new market with its lifestyle TVs. 8K TVs haven’t been as successful but there’s no reward without risk.
That’s the kind of company Hisense is striving to be, but it’s also a position it’s not been in before. There’s a lack of experience in being the no.1, those last few inches (or to keep up the F1 analogy, tenths of a second) to become the best are often the hardest to find.
So its push to become the brand synonymous with RGB Mini LED technology won’t be easy, and the waters have already been muddied with other brands electing to call their models RGB Micro and RGB Mini. If there’s one area that the ‘best’ TV brands manage to do, is that they make others converge to their approach.
It won’t help Hisense if everyone starts calling RGB Mini LED TVs as RGB Micro LED TVs instead. But in this case Hisense is on the right path as Micro LED suggests something else entirely and the usage of that terms risks muddying the waters and confusing customers. In this case the KISS acronym (Keep It Simple Stupid) is something Hisense has taken to heart.
While the performance of Hisense TVs has improved – the U8Q I tested in 2025 was by far the best Hisense screen I’ve come across; and the brand earned its first five-star (at least that I can recall in my time at Trusted Reviews) with the U7N Pro. Quality is definitely on the rise.
The 116-inch UX RGB model, though, wasn’t particularly good. It’s a review I’ve yet to finish writing up but my impressions were that while it delivered a wide range of colours, especially when viewed in a bright room, you can see multiple issues as soon as the light goes. It’s a model reliant on Dolby Vision HDR, as there were problems across HDR10 and HDR10+ content which you wouldn’t expect from a brand that has aims on being a market leader.
Though Hisense has been beefing up its staff across the board, bringing in people who have experience at the likes of Samsung, LG and Sony, I do have some qualms about its overall performance. The U8Q, as I mentioned, was really good. The Hisense Canvas TV less so; the first-gen UX, in my opinion, is not worth its £24,999 price tag.
When Hisense gets it right, it’s very good, but it still lacks consistency and its messaging does at times feel awfully similar to other brands. During its CES conference, Hisense made reference to honouring creative vision, and the image it showed looked so similar to a set-up Sony did at IFA last year that I’m surprising Sony did slap in a plagiarism claim right there and then.
Providing a consistently, high-level experience across its TVs is the next step on the rung for Hisense and RGB Mini LED could assist in achieving that but it can’t drop the ball. Hisense has to get it right otherwise it’ll always the bridesmaid never the bride.
