Since the H9F just hit the streets this month, and is getting some good reviews I thought I would start a official owners thread. This is high on my black Friday shopping list for a gaming TV
Since the H9F just hit the streets this month, and is getting some good reviews I thought I would start a official owners thread. This is high on my black Friday shopping list for a gaming TV /forum/images/smilies/biggrin.gif
Alright so first thing out of the box, I noticed colors seem pretty decent. It defaults to an "energy saver" profile. I just quickly flipped through the default profiles and found "Theater Night" to be most to my liking though it was a tad warm on colors.
I loaded up XBox and went to check resolution settings. It did not detect that it could do basically anything at first and was running at 480p. I had to go into my TV settings and enable all the various HDMI enhanced mode and check chroma 4:2:2 box in the xbox. I remember having to turn on the HDMI stuff in my Samsung TV as well so that should be pretty normal.
Once I did that and got 4k and HDR working, I loaded up Destiny 2 as I know there are many spots in the game that I was looking at a solid black screen on my old TV. Right away when Destiny launched, the TV flips into an HDR profile mode. So that threw off all settings I had done prior to this. Colors did not look great and blacks and low light was god awful. Same thing as my Samsung I just took out, where darker hallways are just solid black and cant see a single thing. Only on this TV it was even worse! It looked like brightness setting had been turned up WAY too high and everything had a light grey overlay to it and I still couldnt see anything.
I wanted to use the TV a bit before doing manual calibration, but since I couldnt even see anything to even play the game and colors were off too I decided I just had to jump straight into manual calibration right off the bat.
I ended up with an "HDR Theater" as my starting point, everything else once again looked way too "cool" and off balance. This profile still didnt let me see anything even remotely in the dark though, so I went into the xbox display calibration to get things set. Followed the instructions there and got it all balanced "perfectly" according to what Xbox said, .....and it still looked horrible. Possibly even worse. lol
So I just tweaked settings manually and ended up with:
Contrast 28
Brightness 25
Color 54 (this over-saturates a bit but makes things really pop. I would say around 45 is probably more color calibrated)
Tint +8 (never once had to change tint on any display before so this one is weird...)
sharpness 5
Color temp Mid-Low
Red -1 saturation
Flesh Tone correction -2 saturation
Gamma 0 (out of a setting of 0-3)
Gamma gain 10 (defaults to 0, adjustable from 0-20)
I also set the local dimming to high in the backlight settings, this made a large difference.
Active contrast was best left off
These settings finally got rid of the greyness to the whole screen that made it look like 50 (on a 0-255 scale) was the lowest it could go by default. Finally I had real black. With my settings above I could also see into dark areas properly and actually find my way down a dark hallway.
These settings made my game look absolutely stunning. Easily the best LCD I have had so far as far as color, black level, overall contrast, and maintaining brightness. It honestly rivals my LG C7 OLED in many areas. I did notice during calibrating that grey uniformity was quite bad. Corners of the screen and some splotches throughout the screen were quite a bit darker than the rest of the panel. When looking at the Rtings review of the H8F (https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/hisense/h8f) I would have to say my panel is slightly worse than the one they reviewed in the H8F
As for color gradients, both pre-calibration and post-calibration I still get black crush at the very end of the scale. The last 2 lines on a color scale look the same. This isnt too much of a problem since the HDMI range doesnt actually go down that low in the "limited" setting the TV uses. Which is probably why it is crushed to begin with. On the white end of things, the last 2 lines of the gradient here are also crushed together. Again, out of the display range of limited HDMI though. The RGB color gradients themselves seem quite good. Better right off the bat than other TVs and monitors I have owned. No banding as far as I can tell.
Now onto motion quality since I could actually play the game. First off, I was amazed at how smooth things were. HOLY CRAP. easily the best I have ever seen outside of running 240Hz/240fps in a game on my PC. So I immediately knew from that level of smoothness and the input lag I felt (seemed like around 100-150ms) that the TV had defaulted to interpolation turned on. I went and turned off interpolation (called Motion Enhancement in settings) and immediately most of the input lag went away. It felt like lag was down around 25-35ms at that point. However games running 30fps and no interpolation are a stuttery mess so of course the motion immediately looked terrible.
I changed profile to game mode, reset my calibration settings (which look nearly identical in image quality compared to outside game mode which is nice) and input lag completely fell away. It was not noticeable at all. Honestly that probably means that it was around 10-15ms. Unfortunately I found to my dismay, no motion interpolation in game mode. This is disappointing as many TVs do let you use interpolation for game mode even if it isnt the full quality stuff like outside game mode. So for me this is really bad since I want to primarily use this as a gaming TV.
Playing around in game for a while I can say that this TV really looks good. But unfortunately it does not fit the criteria I want, which is the ability to give the appearance of higher refresh gaming. Things still stutter like crazy with no interpolation and looks like things smear pretty bad. So if you want to use this for gaming, pass on this TV unless you think you can get used to 100ms input lag.
I went and turned the profile back to my calibrated HDR Theater, with interpolation, and played the game for a while. Motion looked absolutely incredible. So smooth. Never have I seen a TV with interpolation quality like this. Smearing was as non-existent as I have seen on an LCD before, it looked like it was running at 120 frames per second. This 480hz interpolation on a 120hz panel really does the trick.
So with gaming out of the way and knowing that it unfortunately wouldnt fit my needs, I turned to Netflix and Hulu. To my dismay, loading up either of these reset my color profile AGAIN. It seems that even if you set the calibration as apply to all sources, it does not. Every source goes to its own profile, and if you watch an HDR10 movie it uses on profile, while an SDR movie uses another profile, while Dolby Vision loads yet another profile. Obviously these are different modes, but it sucks to have to go through calibration for the Xbox dashboard, in game with HDR, netflix basic, and netflix HDR. The only profile I did not have to adjust was dolby vision default. That mode already looked good as is.
At least once everything was set it did look extremely good. Honestly this is by far the best LCD TV I have ever seen. It rivals my OLED in terms of color, contrast, and even to a small extent black levels. OLED only wins in low level greyscale detail IMO. Extremely impressive for a "cheap" LCD.
Watching a movie or TV with motion interpolation on looked incredible. Not a hint of "soap opera effect" normally associated with interpolation. This is most likely due to the panel being 120hz actual refresh rate and interpolation up at 480hz frames. Combined with the color and contrast this is just an incredible TV. If you are primarily going to use this for watching movies or TV shows then I highly recommend it.
After movie and TV watching I wanted to give gaming one more try. I set the XBox to 1080p, and turned on 120hz. Unfortunately this mode is completely unusable. It is extreme smooth in game, just gorgeous. But the TV has some sort of default in the firmware I believe where the left half of the screen has a much higher "brightness" setting than the right half. You can clearly see as significant transition line right down the middle of the panel. Very distracting and completely unusable. So yet another fail for gaming.
So in conclusion:
Movies - YES!!
Gaming - hard pass unless you can play in 100ms input lag to get interpolation
The stuttering and smearing in game (for console) with no motion interpolation on is just your basic stuff that most anything will have with an extremely low framerate. There is no definition to anything in the game world as you make a turn because the framerate updates so slow that you only have a few frames during the whole turn. It also doesnt seem like the panel is refreshing at 120hz, so the actual pixel transition times with 30fps content are a bit slower. Not really anything necessarily worse about this TV than any other when running really low framerate content like most games on console. It is just the nature of 30fps.
The motion interpolation actually makes the panel refresh at 120hz and interpolates frames to what looks like 240fps to me. The specs say it should go 480 interpolation but Id imagine that is only with 60fps base content. It does the best job I have ever seen on a TV for interpolation, it really does look like there are actually more frames being made by the game. Surprising since with every other interpolation I have seen, if you turn too fast in a game and get out if that "sweet spot" the interpolation is designed for you get all kinds of weird motion artifacts. On this TV I did not notice any of that
On the 1080p/120Hz thing: It is definitely a LOT smoother. Like it is running at 120hz. The right side of the panel that is darker actually looks like it maintains the calibration settings I used. The left side that is brighter (not brighter nit wise but brighter software setting brightness) is what looks like it goes significantly out of the calibration settings. The games on console dont actually send 120fps frames, so I cant say for sure it accepts that framerate input, but it does actually refresh the panel at 120hz when in this mode I can tell that much for sure.
Unfortunately the TV is too big to haul upstairs to my PC setup so I cant really test a PC running much higher framerate content or outputting 120fps at 1080p in a game.
I just got this tv 2 days ago also after doing tons of research, scouring rtings site, slick deals, looking at TVs at Best Buy, Costco, sams, etc. The TVs I was closest to getting were an open box 82” Samsung Q6FN (2018 model open box), lg OLED 65 c series, and the Vizio 65” q f series (2018), but I looked extensively at other higher end QLED displays and open boxes. I also ran DSE tests on many of these panels because DSE and bad grey uniformity issues drove me nuts on my Samsung 75 u8550. With BB’s return policy and the fact that they had the 65 h9f at the warehouse 10 miles away for pick up, I decided to test the hype and buy it.
To say I was blown away is an understatement. Blacks are as close to OLED as I have ever seen. Color and brightness are amazing. I tested using amazon prime/Netflix on amazon fire 4K, and call of duty infinite warfare on Xbox one s. I was looking for every reason hate the tv, and return to get the OLED or other high end 65 inch. I will say that initially I had some weird intermittent pausing that lasted 1-2 frames every minute or two, but the firmware that automatically downloaded fixed it immediately. I did not have the same experience as the previous reviewer the the smearing or the split down the center after running various tests on YouTube and playing Xbox. The leads me to believe that you may need to exchange to get the right panel. The only issues I noted on mine were the corners appear to be slightly darker than the rest of the screen, but still better than the other negatives I saw on other panels in person. Game mode works great, calibration globally and by source was easy (you have to switch it to “by source” or “all sources” BEFORE you make changes which is counterintuitive because it’s at the bottom), and I did not have any smearing. If I personally had to give it a comparable rtings score, I would put it at a 8.5-8.7. I can honestly say if it was the same price as the lg 65 c series OLED I saw, and the OLED could match the input lag of this tv (the OLED is far worse) I would STILL pick this tv. Maybe I just got really lucky, but I am that impressed.
I bought one (from BB) and am pretty satisfied with it. Some random thoughts:If anyone has the 65" variant please post your impressions in this thread.
In a case like this, it's hard to know how all the TVs are set up...but I have to say that in the very brief video clips at the end, the color on the Hisense is less saturated than the Sony and Samsung, and the picture looks kind of flat. The Sony in particular shows better color and more contrast between dark shadow areas and bright areas, where the Hisense kind of makes shaded areas look too bright. Granted the Sony (and the Samsung) are much more expensive displays.https://youtu.be/Lh1CBwzf8uA
This is amazing the H9F looks to be on par. Can’t wait for more comparisons.
Is there any specific reason why you need to get the 55 incher? Wouldn't it be a nice upgrade to get the 65 instead? I think at this budget pricing, it's worth spending a little more for the 65.I am waiting on the 55" H9F to come out, if it ever does.
This guy started making videos on H9F. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqHuvvETx7PKapuchT2BnSA
So far (especially compared to Vizio and the price of $900 for 65"), I am really impressed.
It does seem Hisense has started to shape the TV market. ...then U9F next year, crazy times.