Hisense 116UX Review

This is the first shipping television whose backlight makes its own color. Instead of white Mini LEDs behind a quantum dot filter, the 116UX drives individual red, green and blue emitters across 3,584 dimming zones, so a red object is lit by red light rather than by white light filtered down to red.

The result is a color volume at high brightness that nothing else on sale reaches, and with a quoted 8,000 nits peak the set holds saturation in highlights where an OLED has run out of light. Blooming is reduced rather than eliminated, since the zones are still enormous next to a pixel, and the 165Hz panel and three HDMI 2.1 inputs make it a credible gaming screen if the room can take one.

The scale is the other half of the story. The panel is 116 inches, a little over eight and a half feet wide, and weighs about 225 pounds, so delivery and mounting are a building project. The launch price was $29,999 in August 2025, since cut to $24,999. As a preview of the RGB backlights now arriving at normal sizes it matters a great deal. As a purchase it is indefensible.