Hisense A9G (55A9G, 65A9G) review

One minute review

The 65A9G sees Hisense return to the OLED TV fray for the first time since 2019: It's a sixty-five-inch model that offers the frequent 'every pixel makes its own light and color' benefit that has made OLED so popular with home entertainment enthusiasts.

However, its charms do not end there. Its feature list also includes support for the premium HDR Dolby Vision and HDR10+ formats, as well as the popular HDR10 and HLG systems.. Its smart functionality is provided by Hisense's gradually more palatable smart VIDAA system. And perhaps most promising of all, the 65A9G has been rated by IMAX as a good enough performer to offer the benefits of its IMAX Enhanced Content Dominance System.

The 65A9G also goes the extra mile with its audio, in the form of Dolby Atmos playback compatible with a built-in soundbar and dedicated drivers.

It's also a bit cheaper than its 65-inch OLED contenders, despite having great sound quality and great picture quality. So what's the downside? Competitors like the LG C1 OLED offer superior gaming features and non-stop great picture quality for a little more money.

Prices and availability

• Available in 55 and 65 inch versions.
• The 55-inch and 65-inch TVs cost €1499 / €1499 / €1899, respectively.
• Available in UK and Europe, but not Australia or US.

Hisense A9Gs are widely available in the UK and the rest of Europe, and cost slightly less than competing OLED models. To serve as an example, the 65A9G considered here is lower than the equivalent 65C1 model from LG by around €100.

However, there still doesn't seem to be any evidence that Hisense is ready to launch A9G OLED TVs in its US or Australian markets anytime soon.

Design

• 65-inch OLED screen ultra-thin at its edges
• Integrated "sound bar"
• Quite large by OLED standards in addition to the outer edges
• No HDMI ports supporting 4K / 120Hz

Hisense A9G Specifications

(Image credit: Hisnese)

• Screen sizes: 55 and 65 inches
• Tuner: TNT HD
• 8K: Yes
• HDR: Yes (including Dolby Vision and HDR10 +)
• Display technology: OLED
• Smart TV: VIDAA
• Native resolution: 4K
• 3D: No.
• Inputs: 4xHDMI (each and every v2.0 with some dos.1 quirks), two x USB, RF in, optical digital audio, headphone out, Ethernet, RF port

The appearance of the Hisense 65A9G is indeed interesting. It sits on its desk stand, flush with the surface of your table, and is so large near the bottom 2-thirds of its back that it comfortably accommodates 2 sturdy metal inserts protruding from the sturdy desk-mounted stand. center.

To make sure the screen can't tilt forward, Hisense gives some ballast weights that need to be screwed into each side of the rear "foot", while support at the front is provided by a large bar. This speaker bar features an attractive silver, metallic and grill finish and feels strong and tough enough to do real damage to the sound in the right direction.

The soundbar is saved by trying to reproduce the TV's Dolby Atmos sound reproduction through 2 face-up activated controllers and a dedicated bass monitor on the "thick" part of the back of the TV.

Although most of the rear of the TV is quite deep by today's standards, the 65A9G is actually outrageously thin near its top edges, barely an inch deep in truth. Keep in mind that the display leans very slightly on its stand, rather than being directly upright.

The TV comes with an amazing remote control that is reminiscent of Bang & Olufsen premium brand phones with its metallic silver finish and very stylish angle knobs. Also good to see direct buttons present for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Freeview Play, YouTube, and Rakuten.

Lastly, the Hisense 65A9G's connections are a mixed bag. The good news is that there are 4 HDMIs, such as an optical digital audio input and two USB. The bad news is that none of the HDMIs can handle 4K at 120Hz, depriving owners of PS5, Xbox Series X and the latest premium computer cards of the smoothest and cleanest experience their devices can get.

HDMIs will accept different refresh rates, but only up to sixty Hz, and can accept eARC lossless Dolby Atmos audio pass-through. It also supports the low latency auto mode function, through which compatible sources can point to the TV at what time to activate and deactivate the game's perfect picture mode, according to the genre of content that is being played on the TV. console.

All 4 HDMI ports on the pricier €65 LG OLED1C100 accept 4K 120Hz, as well as Nvidia and AMD flavors of variable refresh rate technology.

(Image credit: John Archer)

Smart TV (VIDAA)

• Smart functionality provided by Hisense significantly improved the VIDAA system
• Offers voice assistant for Google Assistant and Alexa
• Built-in Freeview Play app, aside from Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video, and more
• No Disney + or Apple TV + apps at the time of typing

Hisense's VIDAA smart TV platform is gradually becoming more like Android TV. The home page fills the entire screen with large, easy-to-read icons that provide direct links to stand-alone applications and, the moment an application accepts it, displays programs carried by the most recently used application.

The top 2 rows of app links can easily have their order of execution tailored (except, annoyingly, Netflix seems to be locked into place as its first app, likely on the back of a Hisense/Netflix deal). ), the system runs smoothly and stable, and there is built-in support for Google Assistant and Alexa voice recognition systems.

It's also nice that you can scroll down to access other app-specific content link shelves. The only bad news is the lack of support for Apple TV + and Disney +.

Image quality

• Full HDR support
• Excellent response to the black level
• Some weird preset choices

The picture quality of Hisense's first OLED TVs, the 05BUK lineup from 2019, fell well short of the competition. Fortunately, the 65A9G offers a marked improvement, although it still falls short of its main rivals in certain areas.

Perhaps the best improvement comes from its handling of dark scenes. It manages to present black colors with all the depth and purity we associate with quality OLED images, with no trace of the genre of gray that can infuse dark scenes to a point on virtually any LCD TV.

The 65A9G also delivers those traditional OLED black levels with good stability, and also avoids the tendency for base brightness levels to flicker and subtly jump throughout extremely dark scenes that can still plague certain OLED TVs.

As long as you don't use the poorly designed HDR Day and HDR Night presets, the colors are stunning as well. Rich and vibrant, but also natural and nuanced.

There's not as much out-of-the-box color accuracy as with the best competing OLEDs, and the calibration tools aren't as effective as those of more "experienced" OLED brands. There's also not nearly as much tonal delicacy as OLED TVs like the Sony A90J or one of Panasonic's 2021 OLED models with more powerful and refined processing engines. There can also sometimes be very slight clipping (loss of subtle shading detail) in overly bright color areas when watching violently overpowered 4K Blu-rays; however, unless you know what you're looking for, you may not notice this last drawback.

(Image credit: John Archer)

The 65A9G delivers the sharpness and detail of native 4K sources quite well. You have to be a bit careful with the sharpness setting on your TV; set it too high and images quickly start to look overly grainy and unnatural. However, left fairly neutral, the 4A65G's 9K images exhibit the kind of clarity and added sense of depth that we now expect to see with native 4K content.

Switching between HD and 4K football coverage via BBC iPlayer or Sky is a particularly simple and efficient way to see how much the 65A9G offers the 4K “difference”. However, the 65A9G isn't that great at handling HD sources. Your scaled images look noticeably smoother than those provided by the best competitive scaling engines. Large skin tones can appear plastic, and there is a lack of sophistication in fairly difficult and highly textured areas such as soccer fields, background crowds, and woods and brick shots.

Colors also appear somewhat uneven near the edges of scaled content objects, and all presets except for the 2 theaters are saturated with SDR sources. Cinema presets, on the other hand, look pretty desaturated and flat.

There are other picture preset drawbacks as well, especially, suddenly, when it comes to Dolby Vision. For example, while the perfect Dolby Vision Dark mode offers the most extreme and exciting active range feeling, like the most accurate luminance levels with DV content, it also removes uncomfortable amounts of shadow detail, leaving dark areas of the hollow and artificial image.

(Image credit: John Archer)

One possible reason for the loss of shadow detail in the perfect Dolby Vision Dark mode is that the 65A9G isn't the brightest OLED TV on the market. The highest brightness measurement we were able to achieve on a white HDR box covering 10% of a black screen was 756 nits, and that's on the pretty cool Sport preset. The cinema- and IMAX-related presets were between 500 and 550 nits, a few hundred to hundreds of nits below what many OLED contenders are achieving this year.

The perfect Dolby Vision IQ mode records roughly the preset day out of the box, continuously optimizing images for the lighting conditions in your room. The downside is that the TV appears to be applying unsurpassed little motion processing to the DV IQ mode, which is not useful.

The way the Cinema Night setting produces considerably brighter and more vibrant images than you get with the perfect Cinema Day mode (although the ambient light sensor seems to be on by default with both modes) when probably.