Last year, Amazon released its first self-branded Fire TV Smart TVs with the introduction of its 4-Series TVs and its hands-free Omni Series TVs. Amazon is now following up those TVs with a more premium version of the latter with its announcement of the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED Series of Fire TV Smart TVs. These new TVs from Amazon step up the picture quality significantly with quantum dot displays, full array local dimming, adaptive brightness, and more.
The new Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED Series TVs come in 65-inch and 75-inch screen sizes. They use a quantum dot QLED panel, much like the Insignia F50 Series and Hisense U6 Series Fire TV Smart TVs. Like the Hisense TV, the Omni QLED also features full array local dimming, which has also been available on the Toshiba M550 Series Fire TV Smart TVs until now. The 65-inch Omni QLED has 80 dimming zones and the 75-inch has a whopping 96 dimming zones, which is impressive considering the Toshiba 75-inch M550 only has 42 dimming zones.
These new TVs are capable of 4K resolution at 60 Hz, so you’re not going to be doing any high refresh rate gaming on them, but they do support Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ Adaptive varients of high dynamic range content, which is a first for any Fire TV Smart TV, in addition to regular HDR10 and HLG. What that means is that, when playing compatible content, the TVs can automatically adjust display settings, such as brightness, based on lighting conditions in your room. This is done through a light sensor on the TVs. Even when you’re not playing Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ Adaptive content, the TVs can still use their ambient light sensor to dim the screen at night and crank up the brightness during the day.
When it comes to ports, these new Amazon TVs have 4 HDMI ports, of which one is an HDMI 2.1 port that is eARC compatible. There’s also an optical audio out port, a headphone jack, an Ethernet 10/100 port, and one USB 2.0 port. The TV also has an IR repeater port for the included IR blaster so that the TV can control other equipment, such as soundbars. This is because, like Amazon’s original Omni Series Fire TVs, these new ones also have a mic array for hands-free control. If that doesn’t interest you, you can mute the mics through a physical switch.
Under the hood is, unfortunately, the same dated MediaTek MT9020 (MTK T31) quad-core 1.5 GHz CPU and Mali-G52 MP1 504 MHz GPU found in the majority of 4K Fire TV Smart TVs. Its a real shame that spending over $1,000 on a TV doesn’t get you any better performance than spending $99 on a doorbuster TV deal during Prime Day. This SoC is starting to show its age and is about as powerful as the $30 Fire TV Stick Lite. It’s paired with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. Unlike the new 3rd-gen Fire TV Cube and Fire TV Stick 4K Max, which have WiFi 6E and WiFi 6 connectivity, respectively, these new Amazon TVs only offer WiFi 5 802.11ac.
These new Omni QLED TVs from Amazon are also introducing an all-new Fire TV Ambient Experience which is meant to make the TVs more useful when not in use. One way it does this is through a presence sensor that will automatically turn the TV on when someone is nearby and back off when the room is empty. While the TV is turned on and in ambient mode, it will display 1,500 pieces of curated artwork or your own family photos.
These TVs can also display Alexa widgets which were introduced on the wall-mountable Echo Show 15. The widgets have been optimized for the bigger TV screen and provide glanceable information such as your calendar, schedule, news headline, what’s on TV now, sticky notes, smart home controls, and more. These widgets can take up the entire screen or be minimized to the bottom center of the screen.
The Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED Series TVs are available to pre-order in a 65-inch size for $799.99 or a 75-inch size for $1,099.99 in the US and will ship on October 27th. They are also available in Canada for $1,0699.99 for the 65-inch and $1,499.99 for the 75-inch.
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These will likely be amongst the worst QLEDs money can buy. And OS will run like garbage relatively quickly to the point users will be better off utilizing a streaming stick rather than the built in FireOS. Interested parties are likely better served buying any QLED from any major manufacturer over these. TVs are one of those things that are worth researching and if your able, pay up a little bit to get into the good midrange models. It’s almost always worth it. And in the case of these QLEDs, I’d bet the farm anyone and everyone can do better at that $800+ price point because it opens up a ton of options. Amazon did well with their cheap HD/4k sets. They’ll be stepping up to the bigger, better players in the industry and these TVs won’t hold up. No chance.
Amazon has become very good at producing both hardware and software. They can also sell their hardware at a discount as they sell it direct to consumer with no middleman and also count on customer satisfaction to secure long term business relationships. The quality of this might just surprise you.