Hisense U7S Pro vs SONY BRAVIA 3 II (XR35M2)

Let’s start with the fact that the U7S Pro is an impressively bright TV — in calibrated mode our measurement equipment showed a staggering 2200 nits of peak brightness!

As we know, peak brightness on test patterns is one thing, and actual film scenes are another. Unfortunately, in real video material the backlight output drops noticeably. The TV can still exceed the 1000-nit mark in the most demanding moments — which is still a great result and fits the mastering standards of most HDR films — but the real challenge lies in the aggressively tuned local dimming algorithms. Because of them, small, bright details like stars or the moon in a night sky are noticeably dimmed. The TV tries at all costs to maintain deep black, which is understandable, but unfortunately this comes at the expense of HDR’s dynamic range and brilliance.

The color reproduction is worth praising. The new U7S Pro is a QLED design that provides very wide color gamut coverage. Unlike last year’s model (U7Q Pro), this year’s variant is a true QLED, not a solution based on a PFS filter. As a result, color saturation has increased noticeably, and coverage of the most demanding BT.2020 color space has topped 81%.

Bravia 3 II is certainly not a TV that tries to impress with brightness. In our measurements it reached about 450 nits, so it's far from the strongest designs on the market. That said, HDR here is not just a paper feature. Compared with regular SDR material, the brightest parts of the image can already punch through, and reflections, highlights, or stronger exposures have a bit more energy and stand out better from the rest of the scene. You can see this best in simpler shots where many bright elements appear on screen. Then the Bravia 3 II can give a hint of a higher-dynamic-range picture. The problem only starts with more demanding content, where much greater brightness headroom is needed. There the TV quickly shows its limits and instead of strong, striking HDR we get only a correctly rendered picture.

Colors

Bravia 3 II uses a QLED-type panel, although technically it does not use a traditional quantum-dot layer. Instead Sony applied a PFS phosphor-based solution that serves a very similar role: it allows for more saturated reds and greens and thus lets the TV display a much wider color gamut. Measurements showed about 94% coverage of the DCI-P3 gamut and about 74.4% of the very wide BT.2020. Those are good results for this class of hardware, meaning the Bravia 3 II has no problem showing adequately saturated colors in HDR content. Colors don't look washed out, and the more intense shades can look really attractive.

We tested the U7S Pro, as we always do, in the best factory-tuned picture mode, Filmmaker Mode. The colors can be judged in two ways. The most disappointing was the profile intended for watching SDR content, i.e. traditional broadcast TV, YouTube, and other less demanding material. The image there was clearly yellowish, which turned out to be a direct consequence of a poorly set white balance. As our charts show, there's a large deficiency in the blue component, which drastically affected the overall color temperature. You can see this clearly on the ColorChecker charts and on the color gamut graphs themselves, where most samples shifted toward yellow. Fortunately, the factory HDR mode performed much better. There, color errors hovered around a Delta E of 3, which is a solid result.

In Professional mode the Bravia 3 II, straight out of the box, delivers a fairly good level of color reproduction. In SDR the most noticeable issue is a slightly low gamma, which makes the midtone areas a bit brighter. White balance is not perfect either; as brightness increases there is a slight lack of blue and red, so whites can sometimes take on a slightly warmer, mildly greenish tint. However, these are not errors that immediately stand out while watching a movie. Average error values hover around 3, so the factory preset can be considered quite good. The situation is similar in HDR. Here again there is a slight deficiency in the blue component, so the image is a touch warmer than the reference, but the difference is not large enough to be significantly distracting during normal viewing.

We know, however, that Hisense is capable of much more, as previous generations have shown, so we simply couldn't leave the U7S Pro's factory flaws in everyday content as they were. As always in such cases, we had the TV professionally calibrated. The result? The process brought a massive change. After manually correcting the white balance and filling in the missing blue component, the annoying yellow cast vanished as if it had been wiped away. Whites became naturally clean, and skin tones gained a proper, healthy hue. Importantly, the calibration not only tamed the finicky SDR mode but also squeezed the maximum potential out of the panel, reducing average color reproduction errors to levels almost imperceptible to the human eye. The only thing we still have to fault after the whole process is the nature of Mini-LED backlighting and its specific interaction with the HDR signal. Aggressively tuned local dimming algorithms quite strongly interfere with the EOTF luminance curve. As a result, the backlight doesn't always align with the creator's intent — depending on the scene, the curve can run noticeably above or below the reference, which in places disrupts the ideal dynamics of the HDR picture.

After calibration you can get a lot out of SDR content. The white balance was set almost perfectly, gamma practically matches the reference value, and average color errors fell from around 3 to about 1. That's a level at which differences from the reference image are, in practice, very hard to detect. The Bravia 3 II therefore shows that despite its position in Sony's lineup it has quite a lot of potential for precise picture tuning. Improvements are also visible in HDR, although here you can no longer work around all of the TV's limitations. After equalizing the colors it's easier to notice that the EOTF curve in film material runs slightly below the reference value in places, meaning the Bravia 3 II slightly darkens part of the image. That's not ideal from a reference standpoint, but in this particular TV it also has an advantage. With no local dimming and average black levels, this behavior slightly reduces the visibility of the backlight in darker scenes and helps maintain a greater sense of contrast. So you could say Sony partially masks the limits of the panel that way, rather than trying at all costs to stick to the reference luminance.

The digital processing of lower-quality signals is top-notch here, thanks to the MediaTek Pentonic 800 processor used in the U7S Pro. Upscaling, the TV's ability to pull lower-resolution content up to 4K, also performs well. We didn't notice any unnatural, sharp contours on screen, and our test image with the model simply looked attractive.

The Bravia 3 II is Sony’s first TV to use the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset, and you can see a few changes in image processing. Starting with the basics: upscaling is solid. The TV can sensibly upscale lower-resolution material and doesn’t have a strong tendency to overemphasize jagged edges or other source imperfections. With regular broadcast TV or lower-quality streaming the picture remains quite pleasing. We have more reservations about the digital image processing. In this model Sony replaced the well-known "Smooth Gradation" feature with a new setting called "Digital Noise Reduction." Its role is essentially the same: to smooth unpleasant tonal transitions and artifacts caused by heavy compression. Unfortunately, this feature performs noticeably worse than before. At the "Large" setting — the only one that noticeably affected the picture — the TV can smooth away too many image elements at once, causing film grain to disappear and surface textures or even character skin to start looking unnatural. Worse, the effect is not very consistent. When a scene contains more motion the function’s effect weakens significantly and at times it looks as if the TV stops intervening in the image altogether. For everyday viewing we therefore don’t recommend using it at a high level. It can help on a static shot, but the price is often too much loss of detail.

The Hisense U7S Pro uses a panel with a maximum 165 Hz refresh rate at 4K, and in game mode it can even reach 330 Hz at Full HD. However, it's worth remembering that those highest numbers don't matter much in everyday use, because most content still supports at most 120 Hz (for example when playing on a console). Even so, the TV handles motion quite well and performs well for an LCD design.

There's little to fault about the smoothness itself. In the menu you'll find a motion smoothing feature called "Motion Enhancement", which hides two sliders: blur reduction and judder reduction. They allow manual adjustment of the smoother, which works well for both movies and sports, effectively improving the raw TV signal.

Motion handling is definitely one of the Bravia 3 II's strongest points. The TV uses a 120 Hz VA panel, a solution that by nature, despite the high refresh rate, doesn't always cope well with motion blur. Here Sony has managed to get that problem very well under control. Fast-moving objects remain sharp, and the characteristic trails and blurring are reduced to a very low level, if not to zero. It's one of the least smearing LCD TVs we've had the chance to test. Interestingly, in this respect the Bravia 3 II can even outperform the much more expensive flagship True RGB series: the Bravia 9 II.

If you plan to connect a console or PC to the U7S Pro, you'll be more than happy – this TV is great for gamers. Hisense spared no expense and put in four HDMI 2.1 ports with full 48 Gbps bandwidth. So you won't have to juggle cables, since every port supports the full feature set. There's automatic low-latency mode (ALLM) and VRR, which works across a wide range from 48 Hz up to a cosmic 330 Hz. Of course that 330 Hz is for now a gimmick for owners of powerful PCs, because consoles are capped at 120 Hz anyway, but it's good to have that headroom for the future. The Game Bar is also really useful while gaming. It's a handy in-game menu where, without leaving the TV's main settings, you can quickly change the picture mode, enable a crosshair in the center of the screen, or even switch to an ultra-wide aspect ratio, which PC sim fans will appreciate. The only downside worth knowing about is the incorrect implementation of HGiG in games. The TV ignores the console's instructions for HDR10 output and keeps forcefully altering the image, trying to "improve" it its own way. Because of that, properly configuring HDR in the console menu (where you set brightness using the logo/checkerboard pattern) is a bit more difficult.

Sony Bravia 3 II is a very good TV for gamers, although not everything has been handled the way we'd like. The biggest change concerns the connections. For the first time in a Sony TV we get four full HDMI 2.1 ports with 48 Gb/s bandwidth, thanks to the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chipset. That removes one of the long-standing issues that has plagued the manufacturer's TVs. You can connect several devices at once and use each input's full capabilities, including VRR and ALLM. There's also a simple Game Bar that lets you check key signal parameters and change a few useful settings, such as black level, when you want to improve visibility in darker parts of a game.

There are, however, two limitations worth knowing. The first is the lack of support for 1440p at 120 Hz. This won't be a problem for everyone, but people using that resolution on a console or PC, for example to get higher frame rates in certain games, will have to choose 1080p. We have more reservations about HGiG support. Sony does not allow disabling tone mapping on the Bravia 3 II, so the TV continuously processes HDR content even when you would prefer to leave that task to the console. You can most easily notice this during HDR setup. The checkerboard pattern does not disappear at the point corresponding to the TV's actual capabilities. That doesn't mean HDR in games will look bad. You just need to approach the setup a bit differently and, instead of relying on the pattern, manually set the peak brightness to about 450 nits. The issue can be worked around, but you should know about it before you start configuring your console.