Fire TV Edition televisions from Toshiba are now available for Pre-Order — Details Revealed

Both Amazon and Best Buy have just put up their product listings for the new 2nd-Generation Fire TV Edition televisions made by Toshiba that were revealed last month. These are the first set of new TVs running Amazon’s Fire OS with the Fire TV interface built into the hardware. All of these Toshiba TVs share mostly the same specs except for the TV size, which comes in 43-inches for $329.99, 50-inches for $399.99, and 55-inches for $479.99.

There are still specs about Toshiba’s new Fire TV Edition televisions that are unknown that are probably important for many of you, but the newly published product pages reveal a lot of key details. Toshiba’s TVs are 4K Ultra HD with an expected resolution of 3840 x 2160. They are capable of 4K at 60fps with a 178° viewing angle. They use direct LED backlight that produces a maximum contrast ratio of 4,500:1 for the 55″ size and 4,000:1 for the other sizes.

Best Buy’s title for these TVs says they are “…with HDR” and the specs on Best Buy’s page says they are “HDR compatible,” however, HDR is not mentioned anywhere on Amazon’s product page. I suspect that Best Buy considers any TV that can play HDR video to be an HDR TV, but these TVs are not truly HDR TVs because they can’t output an HDR image. I’ve asked Amazon for clarification and will update this article if I receive a response.

Update

Amazon’s developer device specs page has published and it lists video support as “Hardware accelerated up to 3840x2160p (4K) @ 60fps with HDR10 support.” This doesn’t answer the question of whether the screen on these TVs can truly display HDR video, but the hardware can at least decode HDR video.

All screen sizes of Toshiba’s Fire TV Edition televisions feature 3 HDMI ports, where one is ARC compatible. There is also a single composite video port with RCA audio, but there aren’t any component video ports. The TVs have a 10/100 Ethernet port for wired internet but also come with dual-band, dual-antenna MIMO Wi-Fi for wireless internet. I couldn’t find details about the specific WiFi standards supported, but I assume they are 802.11a/b/g/n/ac.

Audio out comes in the form of one digital optical audio port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The TVs feature a pair of 10w Onkyo speakers, with DTS Studio Sound and Dolby audio. Of course, there is also a coax port to use with HD antennas for the built-in TV tuner.

The last connectivity port is a single USB 2.0 port. The only information available about it so far is that you can connect a USB drive to it to extend the duration of live TV pause from 2 minutes to up to 60 minutes. The first-generation Fire TV Edition televisions from Element had this capability as well, although they used their SD card slot for extending pause duration, not their USB ports. Toshiba’s TVs don’t have any SD or microSD card slots.

Very little is known about what’s under the hood of Toshiba’s Fire TV Edition televisions. They pack a quad-core CPU and multi-core GPU, but the make, model, and clock speeds are unknown. What is also unknown is how much internal storage these TVs have or how much memory they have. I’ve reached out to Amazon about these details as well and will update this article if I receive a response.

Update

Amazon’s developer device specs page has published information about the internals. Toshiba’s TVs use a MStar T12 SoC that uses an ARM Cortex-A53 CPU clocked at up to 1.4GHz and a Mali-T820-MP2 GPU. They have 8GB of internal storage and 2GB of RAM. They run Fire OS 6, like the Fire TV 3, which is based on Android 7.1.

The Alexa voice remote that comes with these Toshiba TVs is very similar to other Fire TV remotes but is slightly different. The usual array of navigation and media buttons that you’d expect are in the upper half, but the bottom half differs from past remotes. The volume buttons are now arranged vertically, instead of horizontally like they were with the 1st-generation Fire TV Edition remotes. The shortcut buttons are also different. There are now 4 shortcut buttons that take you directly to: Prime Video, Netflix, HBO, or PlayStation Vue.

The two completely new buttons on the remote are a mute button and a channel guide button. For the 1st-gen TVs, you had to press a volume button and then the menu button to mute, so it’s nice to see that a dedicated button has been added. The channel guide button is an interesting addition. It, presumably, loads the over-the-air program guide that is unique to Fire OS on these televisions.

As previously mentioned, the TVs come in a 43-inch size for $329.99, 50-inch size for $399.99, and 55-inch size for $479.99. These are much better prices than the previous generation of Fire TV Edition televisions, which were priced $449.99, $549.99, and $649.99 for the same sizes. All sizes of Toshiba’s Fire TV Edition televisions are available to pre-order today and will be released on June 22nd.

6 comments
  1. Vlaves says:

    When their TVs will be available in Europe? Would by them with a corresponding tuner immediately

  2. clocks says:

    Finally a company that makes legs that will fit on my tv stands. I have to find someone that I can sell my 50″ TCL Roku tv to, and then buy a 55″ version of this. The 50″TCL just barely fits, otherwise I would have bought the larger size.

  3. Don says:

    Anything on expanding storage or memory on these.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

Get AFTVnews articles in your inbox!

Get an email anytime a new article is published.
No Spam EVER and Cancel Anytime.

FOLLOW