The Hisense brand is well established in South Africa and its TVs represent some of the best deals for two important reasons: they are the most affordable TVs on the market and they all come with a four-year warranty. This mid-range 55-incher looks particularly stylish with a tiny bezel all round and a metallic strip along the bottom. It covers all the basics well, from the local dimming to support for HDR10 and Dolby Vision image enhancements. Overall, the picture quality was good enough to satisfy movie lovers with a reasonable 6.5 ms response time, which makes it adequate for gaming on older consoles too. TV audio was satisfactory, but nothing special.

We’re especially pleased that all four of the HDMI ports support the new HDMI 2.0 standard and that it includes Bluetooth for hooking up headphones or playing music from your phone. We also like WiFi support for the emerging 5G hz frequency, optimised for multimedia streaming. Hisense’s own Vidaa 4.0 operating system is neat and efficient; getting from Netflix to YouTube to browsing movies on the home network was efficient and painless, and adjusting picture and sound settings on the fly was similarly straightforward. In fact, we rate the Hisense remote as the most intuitive to use of all the TVs on test here (although it might not be the most durable).

However, there are some serious limitations. Vidaa comes with a handful of key apps, including Netflix, Amazon Video, YouTube, Showmax and a few less mainstream media services, but there is no proper app store to download anything more like Spotify, AppleTV+ or Disney+ when it launches in SA. You can get around some of this using the built-in web browser, but its far from ideal.

55” UHD, 60 Hz refresh, HDR/Dolby Vision, 10 W audio, LAN/WiFi/Bluetooth, 4× HDMI 2.0, 2× USB, Vidaa OS, R10 000