Second, while the 55A7GQ’s colours are routinely impacted by the screen’s inescapable grey overwash, there’s enough subtlety in the way blends and tones are presented to reveal that the TV’s core colour processing is pretty good, in keeping with other Hisense TVs we’ve seen recently. With 4x more pixels than traditional Full HD, Hisense's 4K UHD resolution delivers breath taking picture quality and pin-sharp clarity.

On the Hisense 55U7QF, the best out of the box present was Cinema Night with gamma set to BT.1886 and all noise reduction and other image manipulation features switched off. Ultra Smooth Motion and Clear motion were also switched off and the Local Dimming was left at default in Cinema Night mode. The Roku TV smart platform is pretty close to flawless. It covers all the major streaming services as well as thousands of seriously niche ones. You want a channel dedicated to crossbow hunting? It’s there. Fancy gaining more knowledge about the cigar industry? You’ll find that here too, along with plenty of other topics. This cookie is set by Bazaarvoice. This is a session cookie used for internal Bazaarvoice web analytics to be correlated to the same user browsing session for interactions within a particular client domain. Rounding-up on the performance side of things is the gaming capabilities of the U7QF which are decent, with input lag coming in at 17ms in both SDR and HDR modes as measured by the Murideo Seven Generator. HDR gaming was also good, however, there are no HDMI 2.1 features available on the Hisense like VRR or ALLM.ARRAffinity cookie is set by Azure app service, and allows the service to choose the right instance established by a user to deliver subsequent requests made by that user. Discover the best stories from Disney+, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars and National Geographic in one place. With 500+ movies and 300+ TV shows, from timeless classics to new originals, Disney+ has something for everyone. Second, the 55A7GQ’s upscaling of sub-4K sources is rather basic. On the upside, the upscaling does quite well at making pictures look sharp, adding eye-catching emphasis and definition to lines, edges and textures. Unfortunately though, the upscaling seems to make little if any effort to distinguish source noise from real image information, and so ends up sharpening and emphasising noise as well as ‘real’ image information. It also tends to over-exaggerate grain.

It depends on the TV brand and model, phone brand and model, and available screen-mirroring apps. Not to mention the availability of Bluetooth connections. However, as technology improves, more and more smart TVs are capable of being paired with a smartphone.

Moving to the Rec.709 HD colour gamut results and with the white point corrected we also have a near reference result with just two small errors seen on the graph. However, our DeltaE errors are an average of 1.73, so well below the visible threshold of three and we couldn’t see any issues with TV and film viewing. These are impressive SDR results from the Hisense. A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface.

Our guess would be that the 55A7GQ’s issues are down to a combination of its IPS panel and its budget QD colour system. Assuming we’re correct on this, it’s ironic that the IPS panel doesn’t even seem to deliver the viewing angle advantage we’d normally expect such a panel to provide. Contrast clearly becomes even worse if you watch the 55A7GQ from even a slight angle. The 55A7GQ avoids a complete picture quality wash-out on three fronts. First, its native 4K pictures are impressively sharp and crisp. This remains reasonably if not brilliantly intact when there’s motion in the frame, too, thanks to minimal judder and surprisingly little blurring and resolution loss if you call up the set’s decently effective Clear Motion setting.Here’s a rough guide to give you an idea of the minimum distance you should have from your TV when viewing HD content: Disappointingly, there are fewer HDMI ports – three instead of four, but ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) and VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) are covered across all of them so you could plug a game console into any port and benefit from those features – though they are HDMI 2.0 ports, not 2.1 specified. eARC is supported on HDMI 2 for pass-through of lossless audio. The desktop stand also looks more metallic than it actually is, and its ’open’ style minimises the impact the TV has on your decor. If you're too close to a TV, no matter how high-quality the image, it's going to look blown out and poor. Too far, and you may as well watch Netflix on your phone.

With SDR content it fires on more cylinders. As is Hisense’s trademark, images are delivered with a strong sense of colour – primary colours have the look of children’s colouring book in how punchy they look. Complexions are warmly expressed (perhaps overcooked in some places) but it makes for an attention-grabbing image. Many smart TVs come with a feature called something similar to ‘Screen Mirror’ or ‘Wireless Display’. This pairs with a smartphone via an installed app. This then shows your phone screen on the TV, which is great for viewing photos, videos or video chats. Bluetooth is a great feature for a smart TV, as it allows you to connect wireless audio devices; like speakers, headphones, hearing aids, or other peripheral devices like keyboards. Can I pair my phone to my smart TV?

We’re now onto VIDAA U 5.0 and if there’s a difference between this version and previous one, then I’m not seeing it. That said, despite its plain appearance, there’s no argument about navigation and operation. The VIDAA interface is easy to use and there’s something to be said about an interface that settles for that level of simplicity.