Price

The Hisense 100E7NQ Pro really does cost only £1,899. I haven’t accidentally missed a digit out somewhere. To make this time of writing price even more eye-catching, Hisense’s king-sized TV initially launched with a price tag of more than £3,000 that itself seemed strong value.

Now it’s down to well under £2000, though, I couldn’t resist taking a closer look at it despite the logistical issues associated with handling such a huge screen.

The E7NQ Pro range is also available in 55-, 65-, 75- and 85-inch screen sizes, currently costing £449, £699, £899 and £1199 respectively.

These are all aggressive prices for the specification they offer, but here we’re all about the 100-inch model given that it so spectacularly shatters the old ‘rule’ that making the step up to three-figure screen sizes inevitably comes with a monster price jump attached.

The closest rival to the Hisense 100E7NQ Pro is TCL’s 98-inch 98Q9B – a TV that’s two inches smaller and costs £100 more, but is also much brighter and uses Mini LEDs instead of the regular sized LEDs sported by the 100E7NQ Pro.

Design

• It’s very big
• Surprisingly slender bezel for such a large screen
• Sits on two wide-set feet

You won’t be surprised to know the one thing that stands out more than anything else about the 100E7NQ Pro’s design is how enormous its screen is. In total, this TV is 2.23m wide and 1.3m high.

If you’re of the opinion that a 75-inch screen constitutes a big TV, you really need to brace yourself for just how much of a difference another 25-inches impacts your room. It feels like the difference between TV and cinema, basically, without the dark room and throw distance requirements associated with the projectors you’d need to get pictures this big affordably into your home.

Hisense has tried to minimise its epic TV’s aesthetic impact by suspending the screen in a surprisingly narrow bezel – though the main benefit of such a slim bezel is how little it distracts you from the TV’s huge pictures.

This attempt to minimise the 100E7NQ Pro’s non-screen physical presence extends to its desktop  mounting feet, which are simple slender bars that the screen sits way down on so that they become almost invisible from head on.

The screen is unsurprisingly fairly chunky round the back – though not so much that it couldn’t still hang quite effectively on a wall. Provided you have a wall strong enough to support it and enough friends to help you get such a TV beast off the floor. With this in mind, it’s handy that the TV ships with a pair of detachable carry handles attached to its top corners.

Connectivity

• Four HDMIs, two with full 2.1 specification
• Two USB ports
• Optical digital and physical headphone audio outputs

The 100E7NQ Pro is pretty well connected for such an amazingly affordable king-sized TV. It carries a welcome four HDMI ports, one of which supports eARC, and two of which are equipped with enough bandwidth to handle the 4K/120Hz with variable refresh rate features available from the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and well-specced PCs.

The HDMI inputs’ gaming features also support auto low latency mode switching, so the TV can switch into its low latency game mode when a gaming source is detected.

In a perfect world all four HDMIs would meet the full game-friendly HDMI 2.1 specification, but you have to pick your battles with a TV as big as 100E7NQ Pro that’s as affordable as £1,899. And Hisense’s compromise here seems like a relatively sensible one.

The HDMI are joined by a pair of USB inputs, an optical digital audio output, a composite AV input (you don’t see many of those these days), a headphone output and an Ethernet port. Plus, of course, there’s support for both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless connectivity.

User Experience

• VIDAA Smart system
• Voice control
• Dedicated gaming menus

The 100E7NQ Pro is easy to use in most ways considering the level of features it offers. Leading the way is Hisense’s own VIDAA Smart System. This might not be the most glamorous looking smart system around, but it’s logically organised, sensible with its priorities, and offers a solid degree of customisation.

It also carries all the most popular global and local-to-the-UK video streaming services, as well as incorporating the new Freely platform. Backed by the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, Freely lets you livestream most of the terrestrial broadcasting channels previously only available through an aerial – as well as providing access to tens of thousands of hours of on-demand shows from these channels.

The menus run reasonably slickly, with no sluggish responses or crashes, while the remote control carries direct app access buttons to Netflix, VIDAA Channels, Disney+, Prime Video, YouTube and Rakuten TV. Or you can shortcut your way through the menus to specific content or apps by using  the built-in voice control system. 

The 100E7NQ Pro’s picture and sound set up menus are reasonably clear, finally – though as I’ll discuss more in the Picture Quality section, you’ll need to spend a bit more time tinkering about in them than you might like to get the best out of your huge TV.

Features

• FALD LED TV with 256 dimming zones
• Dolby Vision and HDR10+ HDR support
• Up to 144Hz gaming refresh rates

Considering how affordable it is, you could forgive the Hisense 100E7NQ Pro if its huge screen was its only feature. There’s much more going on under its mammoth hood than that. 

For starters, its monster screen is powered by a direct LED lighting system (where the LEDs sit directly behind the screen rather than around its edges) enhanced by a local dimming system operating across a very respectable 256 separately controlled lighting zones.

The VA type of LCD panel it uses can also usually be relied on to deliver better contrast than its IPS alternative.

This lighting engine is claimed to deliver an impressive contrast ratio of 5,000:1, while tests using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 HDR5000 light meter reveal a peak brightness with HDR sources of around 800 nits.

This brightness figure is not particularly high by today’s standards; there are TVs out there these days comfortably hitting peaks as high as 4000 nits, while the TCL 98Q9B mentioned earlier peaks north of 2000 nits.

I’ve seen enough TVs to know the 100E7NQ Pro’s 800 nits is capable of going a long way if its backlight controls are smart enough. Brightness alone isn’t everything; and 800 nits isn’t a bad amount of light for what might reasonably be classed as a budget 100-inch TV.

The 100E7NQ Pro delivers its colours using a Quantum Dot system, rather than the more basic, RGB filter system you might expect with such an affordable king-sized TV.

Impressively, the 100E7NQ Pro supports all four main HDR formats in HDR10 and HLG, plus the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ with their extra scene-by-scene picture information. In fact, it supports the ‘adaptive’ versions of HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, where the TV’s settings are adjusted to take ambient light conditions of your room into account to get a consistent HDR experience.

The 100E7NQ Pro’s picture presets include Filmmaker mode, showing a willingness on Hisense’s part to offer a ‘third party approved’ accurate picture setting befitting of a screen likely to appeal to serious home cinema fans.

The 100E7NQ’s giant pictures are joined by a 2.1-channel speaker system (including a substantial rear-mounted subwoofer) capable of playing both Dolby Atmos and DTS Virtual X audio.

Gaming

• 4K/120Hz and even 144Hz support
• Dolby Vision Gaming mode
• VRR support, including AMD FreeSync Premium

Looking at the 100E7NQ Pro’s gaming features, they’re pleasingly extensive for such an affordable cinema-sized TV. Given how little hiding place there’d be for judder-related issues on a screen this big, it’s good to find it supporting 120Hz refresh rates, even with 4K sources, across two of its HDMI ports.

In fact, if you put it in its Game Mode Pro setting it can even cater for refresh rates up to 144Hz if you have a PC capable of supporting that.

Variable refresh rate support is possible right across its frame rate range too, including in the AMD FreeSync Premium format, while ALLM is on hand to automatically activate the TV’s fastest-response Game mode when a game is detected.

In this mode Hisense’s monster screen takes just 13.1ms to render incoming game graphics, making for a pleasingly responsive experience.

The 100E7NQ Pro provides a dedicated Game menu when a game source is detected, offering a mixture of information on the incoming game signal and a small suite of gaming aids.

Competitive gamers will be dismissive of the idea of gaming on a screen as big as the 100E7NQ Pro, given the importance of being able to take in the entire ‘scene’ of a game at a glance to achieve a marginal advantage with reflex-based games.

For your average gamer, enjoying your latest favourite game on a screen as big and watchable as the 100E7NQ Pro is an experience that once enjoyed is hard to be without.

Exploring detailed game worlds like Oblivion or any of the Assassin’s Creed worlds on a screen this detailed and colourful at essentially life size (and beyond) is a constant joy.

And honestly, if a few extra deaths is the price to pay for playing faster response games such as Call Of  Duty, I really think most gamers will be more than happy to pay it. Going back to gaming on my resident ‘puny’ 75-inch TV actually felt painful.

Picture Quality

• Good contrast and backlight control
• Irresistibly epic scale
• Surprisingly rich but also subtle colours

I hadn’t expected particularly great things from the 100E7NQ Pro’s picture quality, honestly. Surely so much affordable quantity must seriously trump quality, right? Actually, no. Or, at least, not by nearly as much as I’d have thought.

Providing an excellent foundation to the 100E7NQ Pro’s pictures is a seriously impressive performance by its local dimming system. Dark scenes and picture areas enjoy really quite convincing black colours much less troubled by either general greyness or specific areas of backlight inconsistencies and blooming.

These engagingly deep and consistent black levels are achieved without looking forced. By which I mean that even the darkest corners appear with plenty of subtle greyscale and shadow information in them, rather than such details being crushed out into the blackness.

This shadow detail point is particularly welcome on a TV that isn’t particularly bright by today’s LCD TV standards. On that point, though, despite its 200-plus dimming zones doing such a good job of suppressing unwanted light and blooming around bright highlights, the 100E7NQ Pro typically feels brighter than it measures.

Partly because it holds on to more brightness with HDR images that fill the whole screen with light than expected, and partly because the local dimming operates cleverly enough to not have to dim bright highlights as much as might be expected when against dark backgrounds.

In the end I’d always prize good black levels on a TV, especially a really big TV, over brightness.

The 100E7NQ Pro’s winning combination of decent brightness and excellent black levels plays into some seriously satisfying colours, too. High dynamic range sources are presented in most of the default picture presets with eye-catching vibrancy and intensity that again feels – perhaps because of the impressively rich black base colours are appearing against – like it’s pushing beyond the sort of colour volumes you might expect to get from an 800-nit screen.

Even better, colours still manage to look quite authentic (even with skin tones) and balanced in all but the 100E7NQ Pro’s most aggressive preset, meaning the decently accurate but relatively flat-toned Filmmaker mode preset doesn’t necessarily have to be the only option for home cinema fans on movie nights. Especially as even the most heavily saturated HDR areas manage to retain plenty of subtle tonal shifts and blends.

This surprising colour finesse contributes to a good sense of fine detail and sharpness in the 100E7NQ Pro’s pictures. Sometimes 100-inch or so screens can look a little soft or pixelated even with 4K sources, but this doesn’t happen with the 100E7NQ Pro. Instead 4K pictures feel clean, smooth, full of depth and, as a result, direct and immersive.

My main gripe about the 100E7NQ Pro’s images is that some of its out of the box picture presets don’t seem very helpful. The Standard mode feels a bit over-aggressive until you turn off the TV’s Adaptive Contrast setting, for instance.

The Filmmaker mode becomes greyer in dark scenes than I would like it to, while the HDR Cinema mode plays it too safe, looking pointlessly similar to Filmmaker mode when a bit more colour punch would have made it a more useful mid-point mode between the Standard and Filmmaker modes.

You need to be careful with the motion settings as some of the provided options either over-smooth the image so that films become soap operas, or cause a little stutter every few frames. Though the TV actually doesn’t suffer too excessively with judder or motion blur with 24p films if you leave the motion processing off, so maybe that’s your safest option in the end.

The single biggest flaw in the 100E7NQ Pro’s handling of HDR pictures is its Dynamic Tone Mapping system. This is designed to try and continually optimise the look of relatively basic HDR10 and HLG pictures to the screen’s capabilities, but it tends to be optimistic about those capabilities, resulting in the brightest highlights of pictures looking stark and bleached of detail.

Most of the sort of issues I’ve described with various 100E7NQ Pro presets can be resolved, or at least improved with judicious tweaking of the TV’s settings (though turning off the Dynamic Tone Mapping does cause pictures to become quite a bit less punchy). It’s just a shame such manual intervention is so routinely necessary.

Upscaling

• Clear, detailed upscaling

The ability of a 4K TV to convert high and standard definition image to its much higher resolution is more important than ever with an 100-inch screen. Happily the 100E7NQ Pro punches above its incredibly affordable weight here, with Hisense’s picture processing system managing to add the necessary millions of extra pixels without the results looking soft, noisy, or short of detail.

The colour tone of each added pixel seems well judged, too, leading to neither general colour shifting issues nor any sense of colour blockiness or banding.

Not surprisingly, upscaling SD sources proves more of a challenge given how far the pictures have to stretch and how little ‘true’ source data the TV has to work with.

I’d still say that even heavily compressed SD digital broadcasts remain watchable, but if you want a TV this big, you need to commit to partnering it with the highest quality sources you can afford.

Sound Quality

• 2.1 sound system
• Lacks bass

The 100E7NQ Pro’s 2.1-channel integrated sound system doesn’t quite deliver the same sort of cinematic effect its epic pictures do.

Chiefly because despite the sizeable looking subwoofer on the TV’s rear, bass doesn’t really hit the sort of bass depths and volumes I’d hoped it would, while at the other end of the spectrum treble effects tend to be rather muted, leaving mixes short of detail.

It’s not all bad on the sound front by any means, though. The speakers can get quite loud by TV standards without starting to distort or muffle, and soundtracks mixed in Dolby Atmos or DTS:X are both portrayed with a pretty sizeable soundstage where effects are cast beyond the screen’s enormous boundaries without becoming incoherent or brittle.

Vocals always sound clear but also contextualised against the rest of the mix, as well as appearing to come from the onscreen action rather than from below or behind the screen. The mid-range sounds reasonably open and clean too – though while this smooth mid-range means the TV sounds fine with most TV show soundtracks and movie scenes, it can also highlight how relatively little extra bass there is to be found when the going gets explosive.

Should you buy it?

FAQs