Hisense 110UXN

With 2024 sales trends, and most of the AV news from the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, all pointing towards a sudden explosion in the market for truly king-sized TVs, it seems appropriate that Sound Advice starts 2025 with a review of the most massive TV we’ve ever tested: Hisense’s monumental 110in 110UXN. With an equally mammoth price tag of £19,999, though, Hisense’s whopper will need to have more than just epic screen size going for it…

Picture Quality

Now that 100in-or-so TVs can be had for less than a couple of grand, the £19,999 required for Hisense’s 110UXN means one of two things: either its extra 10in of screen is insanely expensive to manufacture on a pound-per-inch basis, or that the 110UXN is no ordinary big-screen display. Happily, the latter option proves to be the correct.

For starters, Hisense claims that its flagship TV is capable of hitting a monster brightness output of 10,000 nits. That’s enough to cover the entire light range of the current high dynamic range specification, as well as being more than two-and-a-half times brighter than the previous brightest TV I’ve ever tested (and more than five times as bright as the punchiest OLED TV currently available). In fact, having equipped myself with a new ultra high-end light meter especially for the occasion, I measure the 110UXN at 11,500 nits. Strewth!

Presumably this is what 80s synth pop legends A-ha were talking about when they said the sun always shines on TV…

Contrary to what you’re probably thinking, I’m not writing this review with permanently damaged eye-sight. In fact, I didn’t even have to don shades to enjoy what the 110UXN was so enthusiastically pumping out at me - instead, I just felt like I was seeing the most intense HDR effects (in reflections, artificial lights and, especially, daytime exterior shots) that I’ve ever seen on a TV. And far from being tiring or harsh, the main feeling this intensity gives me is pure exhilaration.

That said, the 110UXN’s peak brightness isn’t available in any of the TV’s default picture presets. It’s only unlocked by deactivating all the eco-based power-limiting features and turning on a ‘Brightness Burst’ feature hidden in the AI menus. This suggests Hisense thinks that maybe the 110UXN’s maximum brightness is a bit much for regular viewing. It’s worth saying, too, that the 110UXN can only hold on to its maximum brightness over a fairly small picture window (5% of screen area) for a handful of seconds at a time. But neither of these limitations, in truth, are noticeable while watching real world content.

If you find the ‘Brightness Burst’ feature makes the image a bit too ‘peaky’ and opt to turn it off, the 110UXN still hits sensational - and more stable - light peaks of around 6,000 nits. Rest assured you’ll still get HDR performance the likes of which you won’t have experienced before.

Anyone with even a passing understanding how LED TVs such as the 110UXN work, though, will know that while brightness is a key ingredient of a compelling HDR picture, it’s absolutely not the only thing that matters. All that light needs to be controlled. Which brings us to another insanely big number on the 110UXN’s menu: a claimed 40,000 local dimming zones.

Ill-advised efforts to count these zones predictably fail, but I see nothing during these efforts to make me think Hisense is making up the colossal number of dimming zones its TV uses. On the contrary, for much of the time the 110UXN’s ability to deliver truly jaw-dropping levels of brightness even in very small areas of the screen, without that light bleeding out into the surrounding picture areas, makes that preposterous dimming zone number look extremely credible.

The 110UXN’s tight light-control doubtless owes a debt to its use of tiny Mini LEDs. And that’s in addition to the outstanding contributions of Hisense’s new ‘Hi-View Engine X with AI PQ’ processor, which has been specially designed to have enough power and AI-infused know-how to cope with the light range and dimming zone numbers the 110UXN so enthusiastically provides.

While the processor’s biggest efforts are likely going into mapping incoming images to those 40,000 dimming zones, its most obvious results are seen both in its upscaling of sub-4K content and its fantastic colour handling. The former finds the 110UXN adding the millions of pixels-worth of information necessary to convert HD to 4K with remarkable intelligence, actually making the results look sharp, crisp, genuinely detailed and uncannily free of exaggerated source noise or upscaling processing artefacts. A brilliantly calibrated ‘Super Resolution’ feature also means that native 4K sources look phenomenally crisp, despite being stretched to 110in across.

Pre-testing worries that the 100UXN’s unprecedented brightness might lead to thin, washed-out colours prove emphatically unfounded. Its vast colour volumes and virtually endless subtleties are so gorgeous, in fact, that I feel I am for the first time seeing exactly what long-running Quantum Dot colour technology is truly capable of.

While the 110UXN is clearly designed to live and breathe HDR, it’s worth saying that its ‘Filmmaker Mode’ and ‘Movie’ presets also see it delivering SDR sources with surprising naturalism and balance. The ‘Standard’ picture preset is also designed to inject at least some of the screen’s extreme capabilities into non-HDR sources - if that’s what you want.

The 110UXN isn’t quite perfect, though. For one thing, some of the screen’s brightest peak areas can look a little bleached of subtle shading detail. But the main issue is that sometimes, with shots that feature either a few bright highlights against a mostly dark background or lots of subtle details tucked away in the shadows, the picture can suddenly exhibit evidence of backlight clouding and blooming. It’s faint, but it can spread over more of the image than you might expect of a screen packed with so many dimming zones. And when it happens it can cause the picture in the affected area to look a touch hazy.

This is down, I think, to Hisense building the 110UXN on an IPS (In Plane Switching) LCD screen. I can see why the company may have felt that IPS’s viewing angle advantages over the alternative VA (Vertical Alignment) panel type seem sensible on a 110in screen likely to find itself in a large room with seats scattered all around - but the relative difficulties IPS pixels have with controlling how much light they let through versus VA panels are likely the reason for the occasional clouding.

The good news is that the sort of content that causes the clouding is quite rare, and you’re much less likely to notice it if you maintain a little lighting in your room. And if any TV can still look spectacular even when not in a darkened room, it’s the Hisense 110UXN.

Sound quality

Hisense has gone big on the 110UXN’s audio. Each side of the screen sports a gleaming ‘grilled cylinder’ of speakers, while the TV’s rear carries two banks of dual subwoofers. There are further up-firing speakers in the top edge too, which as well as providing a sense of height to the 110UXN’s sound when playing Dolby Atmos tracks also helpfully ‘fill in’ the epic space between the left and right speakers created by the huge expanse of screen.

The left and right speakers are powerful enough to project the sound some distance beyond the screen’s extremities, resulting in a pretty immense soundstage. There’s plenty of well-placed and clear detail on this soundstage, too, especially with Dolby Atmos sources, and those rear subwoofers ensure that action scenes never feel short of clean, distortion-free bass. Ultimately there isn’t enough forward presence to the 110UXN’s sound to make it feel quite as immense and cinematic as its enormous pictures. But it remains one of the better-sounding TVs around.

Living with

Coping with a 110in TV is not for the faint hearted. Most home-owners will need to think about it more as a replacement wall than a regular TV, and the 110UXN’s dimensions and 100kg-plus weight make it worth tracking down an expert AV installation team (unless you happen to have at least three fit, healthy and willing - or bribable - mates.

The 110UXN is a genuine TV rather than just some dumb monitor. Its VIDAA smart system carries all the world’s key video streaming services - even Freely is on hand to permit live streaming of many of the UK’s terrestrial broadcast channels. And its connections include four HDMIs, two of which can cope with all the latest gaming features (4K/120Hz graphics, variable refresh rates, auto low latency mode switching, even 144Hz refresh rates if you’ve got a suitably potent PC). The screen gets its render time down to a respectably low 30ms in ‘Game’ mode… but I’m getting too bogged down in the detail here. All that really needs to be said is that you haven’t played Call of Duty, Forza Horizon, Gran Turismo 7 and all the rest until you’ve played them on a 10,000-nit, 110in mini-LED TV. ‘Life-sized gaming’ is definitely my new jam.

One last helpful feature of the 110UXN to mention is that it supports all four of the main HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. So, it will always play the best version available of any source you feed it.

Conclusion

The 110UXN is a game-changing TV in all sorts of ways. It’s got more dimming zones than any TV before. It’s brighter than any TV before. It delivers a wider range of colours than any TV before. And most of all, of course, it’s bigger than any true (as in, not projector-related) TV most mere mortals have seen before.

Hisense’s decision to build the 110UXN’s magnificence around an IPS rather than VA panel type is questionable, perhaps. But the issues this causes feel as puny in the context of everything the TV gets right as 55in TVs look to me now.

Test Samples

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Xbox Series X

The latest Call of Duty game carries the best campaign the series has given us for years, delivered in state-of-the-art HDR graphics accompanied by an all-timer of a Dolby Atmos soundtrack. And I’m now firmly of the opinion that you haven’t experienced gaming unless you’ve played the Black Ops 6 ‘zombie’ level on the 110UXN with the sound cranked right up. Truly next level.

Babylon 4K Blu-ray

The aggressive HDR mastering on the 4K Blu-ray of Damien Chazelle’s misunderstood tale of the early, debauched days of Hollywood is a tough challenge for any LCD TV. And it does a great job - especially in the early Hollywood mansion ‘orgy’ sequence - of revealing both the extreme strengths but also occasional backlight weaknesses of the 110UXN. 

Joker 2: Folie à Deux 4K Blu-ray

The consistently gorgeous cinematography of this other recent misunderstood masterpiece (!) arrives on one of the best-looking and best-sounding 4K Blu-rays around. The 110UXN does epic justice to the film’s cinematic qualities, especially during the controversial musical set pieces.

Deliberately designed without compromise to prove that Hisense is now far from just a budget brand, the 110UXN’s unprecedented specification results in a massive, future-proof demonstration of both jaw-dropping spectacle (and surprising subtlety and finesse) that really brings cinema home.

Great though the 110UXN’s upscaling of HD content is, any TV as big as this really needs to be partnered with as many 4K sources as possible. Panasonic’s UB9000 4K Blu-ray player is a great premium option to consider, especially as it allows you to optimise its output for high-brightness TVs. A Sky Q or, if your broadband is fast, Sky Stream system with a UHD subscription would also open the door to lots more 4K content, as well as subscriptions to 4K streaming services such as Apple TV+, Disney+, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

If you decide to add an external sound system, I’d suggest a proper separates system rather than a soundbar, to do the screen some justice.