Hisense S7 Canvas and UXQ: what they ship with and what comes off

These two are the odd extremes of the Spanish Hisense catalogue. The S7 Canvas is a 55 and 65-inch television that hangs like a painting, wooden frame and all. The UXQ is the opposite: 100 and 116 inches, 108 kilos for the larger one, a piece of furniture that decides the whole room.

What they share is the point here: both are bought for what they physically are, not for what they do. And both ship with the most locked-down platform on the market.

Three labels for the same system#

The S7 Canvas declares HomeOS U9 in the operating system field. The UXQ, far above it in price, declares VIDAA U9. And the UR8 and UR9, which sit in between, declare HomeOS U9.5.

These are not three systems. It is VIDAA renaming itself to HomeOS with the change half done, and the catalogue showing all three snapshots at once. The previous generation of the canvas set, the 55S7NQ, still declares VIDAA U8.

What matters: neither runs Android. There is no ADB, no pm disable and no way to install anything from outside the store. We cover the whole thing in Hisense on VIDAA: what you can clean up when there is no ADB.

One warning, because the table misleads: on the 100UXQ sheet the Anyview Stream row says "Android". That refers to the phone app, not to the television.

The S7 Canvas: furniture with a teak frame#

TV type, says the sheet: Canvas TV. The frame is removable and made of aluminium, and the teak one is included; walnut and white are sold separately. They are magnetic, according to the marketing block.

The numbers that explain what all that is for. Without stand and without frame, the set is 30 mm deep with a 3.6 mm bezel at the top and sides; with the teak frame, 34 mm and 21.2 mm on all four sides. The box carries a separate carton for the wall mount, which is included. VESA 300×200 on the 55 and 300×400 on the 65, at 14.5 and 23.2 kg without frames.

It is, in short, a television designed not to look like one.

Gallery mode and the power figure nobody checks#

Here is the number nobody looks at before buying. The S7 ships with Art Gallery, offering "+1000 free artworks", and a motion detector that, according to Hisense, "intelligently turns your room into a gallery, showing masterpieces and photographs only when you are present, helping reduce energy consumption".

Read that backwards: picture mode lights the screen during hours when an ordinary television would be off. Hisense knows it, which is why the detector is there.

What does that cost? The sheet does not say. What it publishes is the energy label: 74 kWh per 1000 hours in SDR for the 55-inch and 130 in HDR; 80 and 160 for the 65. Those thousand hours are hours of television watched. The Power consumption in use row shows 160 W and 180 W, and standby is ≤0.5 W, with ≤2 W for networked standby.

None of those figures covers the picture hours, which are neither standby nor watching television. Hisense publishes no consumption figure for art mode, and art mode is exactly why this set gets bought.

Nor does it say what the detector is. There is no row in the table for it: no camera, no infrared, no radar. The only sensor row reads Light sensor: Yes.

What the S7 sheet gets wrong#

Three things, and all three are in the table.

Audio power (output) declares 0. The marketing block talks about a 2.0.2 system. The missing figure turns up, looking exactly like watts, in another row: Game mode (input lag): 2*10W+2*8W. Those are the same watts the 55S7NQ declared the year before. Someone pasted the audio into the lag box, so neither the power nor the latency is published.

On-screen display languages carries no languages: it carries the app list, copied from the row below.

And Peak brightness says NA, while the AI RGB Light Sensor block promises "a higher brightness peak during the day". The only brightness published is the typical one: 500 nits in both sizes.

What is clear: it has no local dimming (Local Dimming Zones: NA), no Dolby Atmos, and no PVR or time shift, which the UR8 and UR9 do have. Of its four HDMI ports, two are 4K at 60 Hz only; the 144 Hz sits on HDMI3, which is also the eARC port, and on HDMI4.

The UXQ: the UR9 pattern, again#

Now the other extreme. The 100UXQ declares 3,456 local dimming zones and the 116UXQ 3,584. That does rise with the diagonal, and it is far more than the 1,320 of the largest UR9.

The rest goes backwards.

Three HDMI, not four. The 100UXQ declares HDMI4: NA and the 116UXQ leaves the row empty. Exactly what happened on the UR9. The 116-inch television has one input fewer than the 55-inch S7 Canvas.

165 Hz, where the UR8 and UR9 declare 180. Bluetooth 5.3, where the tier below has 5.4. Contrast 6500:1, where the 85UR9S declares 8000:1. And a colour gamut of BT2020≥95%, where the UR sets declare BT2020 100%.

Then the brightness. Typical: 600 nits on the 100 and 700 on the 116, below the 800 of every UR9. Peak: 5,000 nits on the 100 and 4,000 on the 116. The largest television in the catalogue declares a lower peak than the 85UR9S, which sits below it and declares 5,000.

Meanwhile, the marketing block on both pages announces "up to 8000 nits of peak brightness". That number appears in no table.

Input lag gets worse with size too: 7 ms at 4K 120 Hz and 11 ms at 4K 60 Hz on the 100; the 116 declares only 14.6 ms at 4K 60 Hz, and no figure at 120.

Half-finished spec sheets#

The 100UXQ page opens with a block titled "116" Infinity Vision". On the sheet of a 100-inch television.

The 116UXQ is worse: several rows kept the internal spreadsheet placeholders. Country-specific apps (Spain): #N/D. PVR and Time Shift: "Refer to Area List + PVR sheet". Key apps: "Refer to APP sheet". Anyview Stream: #N/D. It declares no warranty either, which the 100 does: 36 months.

To place where the documentation runs out: the 136-inch MicroLED that crowns the range promises "up to 10,000 nits" and has its specification table completely blank. Not even an operating system appears.

What they ship with#

The 100-inch UXQ declares twelve apps in Spain: Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, MAX, SkyShowtime, DAZN, Movistar+, YouTube, PlutoTV, miTele, Atres Player and RTVE a la Carta. The S7 Canvas carries those same ones plus Orange: thirteen. The browser is Odin on both. For the 116UXQ, nothing is known: #N/D.

What comes off#

Without pm disable, this is what is left, and it is not nothing.

Select an app on the home screen and, if the system allows it, a bin appears. System apps and the ones there by commercial agreement do not have it; the rest go.

Reorder the home screen and push what you do not use to the end.

Turn off content recognition and personalised advertising in the privacy settings. That changes more than anything else, and it takes two minutes.

On the S7, if you are going to use it as a picture, decide for yourself what the motion detector does.

And do not link an account if you are not going to install anything from the store: the television works without one.

What cannot be done#

Installing from outside the store, changing the launcher, disabling system components or connecting over ADB. None of that exists here.

What is worth using#

Both declare a channel order that is exportable and editable on a PC. The S7 remote is the ERF6P66H, the same one as the UR8 and UR9, and declares zero batteries; the UXQ one is the ERF6G66H, with a solar panel and USB-C charging according to its page.

If you have one#

What Hisense does not tell us is missing: what the S7 draws in picture mode at factory brightness, what exactly the motion detector is, how much free memory the information menu reports, and whether the 116UXQ has PVR. Write to us and we will add it.