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Armed With Some Serious Tech, Hisense Announces ULED

Rob Sabin  |  Aug 27, 2015

With pomp embodied by New York City’s famous art deco Edison Ballroom, NBC autosports commentator Leigh Diffey as master of ceremonies, actors dressed as moving sculptures, an urban artist-in-residence creating a canvas for the occasion, and a confetti canon being fired off, China’s largest TV maker Hisense ushered in its new generation ULED Ultra HDTVs this week.

And all that hoopla might be justified. The curved 65-inch model 65H10 announced last night (a 55-inch version will follow) packs some serious technology and will be of interest to the enthusiast community. Hisense executives described a significant R&D effort dating back to 2012 to create an affordable yet high-performing platform to stand up to the likes of not only today’s best LCD sets, but even the OLED technology now being promoted today solely by LG.

A demo stand at the event showed a 65H10 running 4K test clips and competing favorably, albeit in press conference conditions, with a flanking “OLED” (manufacturer unidentified but presumably LG) and an “SUHD” (presumably Samsung). With its attractive $3,000 price point (available for now exclusively through Amazon), the set would only need to come close to the performance of those sets in controlled conditions to represent a great value.

The short list of tech built-into the TV is in keeping with what we’ve seen in the better models from more dominant brands. Critically, it boasts a 240-zone full-array, local-dimming LED backlight and what Hisense is calling “smart peaking” technology and dark-field image enhancement to give it exceptional contrast and allow it to boost the brightness of highlights to up to 875-nits in individual zones. That’s HDR territory, though no claims are being made that the set will recognize or decode HDR-encoded UHD content that’s starting to come down the pike this year.

Additionally, Hisense is using 3M’s quantum dot nanocrystal film technology to achieve a wide color gamut that’s said to offer 141% of the colors available in the current Rec. 709 HDTV standard, 108% of the NTSC gamut, and 91% of the Rec. 2020 gamut that’s considered a distant target for Ultra HDTV. The company has partnered with dbx-TV on the design of the internal sound system.

More information is available at Hisense-usa.com/uled, and the set is available for preorder on Amazon as of today.

COMMENTS
jnemesh's picture
Submitted by jnemesh on August 28, 2015 - 9:04am

Well, this makes me much less apprehensive about Hisense taking over the Sharp brand next year! Sharp wasn't planning a nanocrystal display nor HDR support...instead they were talking about 4k Quattron for next year, before the sale was announced anyway...maybe Hisense taking over means that we will actually see Sharp displays that are competitive. Here's hoping!

dakmart's picture
Submitted by dakmart on August 28, 2015 - 7:40pm

For all the new acronyms here, we're still talking about an LCD set, right? And while I would never rush to judgment based on photographs taken at a trade show (if you look carefully, the ULED picture is slighly different from the other two), the OLED set next to the Hisense set seems to produce deeper blacks.

The significance of this set is either that Hisense wants to be seen as a technology leader, or that nanocrystal technology and full-array local backlighting have come down in price enough so companies like Hisense can start offering them in their televisions.

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