The panel looks fairly good and would rate very highly if it was being reviewed a few years ago but compared to what is on the market today, it sits in the mid range. When making this assessment, it wouldn't be fair to compare it with the LED backlit offerings that have made LCD significantly better in the last couple of years. Instead, traditional backlit units are this model's direct competitors.
With an introduction like that, you would probably expect the worst from the rest of this review, but the Hisense isn't a bad television at all. In fact the image quality is above average and at this price point, it is impressive. However, it does suffer from a few problems, the most pressing of which is backlight bleeding at the bottom of the screen. Black levels also look a little greyer than most LCD televisions but when a full screen image is being displayed, it isn't that bad.
The native resolution of the panel is 1920x1080 and it definitely looks best when watching Blu-ray films. We tested the unit using a Blu-ray test disc as well as a selection of Full HD films. We also used the Playstation 3 to test gaming performance and viewed standard definition DVDs to see how well the scalers worked.
In the Blu-ray tests, the biggest downfall was edge definition. Images tended to look a little soft at times removing a little of the advantage of watching a Full HD movie. This carried over into gaming too. At default settings, the sharpness is set too high so there is quite a few halo artefacts and turning down the sharpness to remove them completely results in the image looking too soft. You can always leave a little of the haloing in place to make the image look a little crisper but, in the end, the softer image is more pleasing to the eye and closer to the image quality you would expect when watching Blu-ray.
