MediaTek’s Foray into Smart TVs with the Pentonic 800
While I haven’t personally used a Smart TV powered by the MediaTek Pentonic 800, one of the most popular news pieces from IFA 2025 (tech industry exhibition) was that the new Hisense TVs would be powered by this SoC. And I haven’t used Hisense either (though you get them on Best Buy, I think).
And this Mediatek SoC is also one of the first to support the new Dolby Vision 2 that has been released this month. As a home theatre lover, my interest is definitely piqued there.
So, what exactly is the Pentonic 800, and why should we be searching to see its name in a Smart TV product description section?
Let’s get into the nitty-gritties!
The Power Behind it All — including Entertainment and Gaming
The Pentonic 800 is a powerful system-on-chip (SoC) designed to drive the performance premium TVs, for all purposes including entertainment (obviously), and gaming. Its architecture combines:
- A quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 CPU
- A Mali-G57 GPU
- Mediatek’s in-house AI processor
Apart from the fast + smooth + seamless + hassle-free performance (on paper, at least), this also delivers visuals in 4K at up to 165Hz with Variable Refresh Rate (VRR). Needless to say, that’s an incredibly high refresh rate for a TV, and this is a definite highlight for gamers as well, an overall high-quality, immersive experience. Good for a gaming party with a crowd and popcorn, and more visibility than on a monitor.
AI Features — Omnipresent, All-Powerful
One of the features that is highlighted is the AI-powered upscaling. The Pentonic 800 SoC can convert SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) to HDR (which has a wider range of brightness and color) in real time, and uses scene recognition to automatically adjust settings.
Image source: https://us.dangbei.com/blogs/newsroom/hdr-vs-sdr-which-is-better-for-your-home-theater-setup?
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What this means is that the brightness and saturation on screen are adjusted to fit/ improve the mood of what you are watching — for a horror movie, the overall visual vibe will be murky and scary, the green popping in a nature documentary, and so on.
It also integrates noise reduction and super-resolution to improve older or lower-quality content without overprocessing (unlike what you see in phones, hopefully). If it works as well as is described, this could be a big upgrade for anyone who likes watching older media with higher quality visuals.
Immersive Audio, and Adequate, Fast Connectivity
As said above, the audio experience is superior, thanks to its support for advanced formats like Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, so it should pair really well with a surround system or soundbar for a more cinematic atmosphere.
The chipset supports up to four HDMI 2.1 ports with 48Gbps bandwidth, Wi-Fi 7 readiness, and advanced Bluetooth.
TVs we can see this in:
Brands like Sony, Phillips, Hisense, and TCL are integrating this chipset into upcoming models, so it might not be long (and hopefully we get them in the US too, with good support) before many of us have a chance to test it out in the real world.
The hardware in some smartphones these days is absolutely amazing, and I’m just imagining what sort of experiences we can get in TVs as well, with a solid visual and audio system. And these Pentonic 800 supported ones do seem worth a try.
