Lots of features for a pretty low price – and a surprisingly good performance, too
Amazon Fire TV devices are seriously popular – to the tune of more than 200 million of them having been sold worldwide. Amazon must anticipate sales will eventually slow down, though, as more people become owners of TVs that are already smart and therefore don’t need a Fire Stick. That is presumably why the company has finally decided to cut out the middleman and produce its own range of TVs with the Fire OS platform built in. Top of that range is the Omni QLED. It’s still very much a value-oriented proposition – and it’s really rather good.
Unsurprisingly, the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED doesn’t feature the sort of craftsmanship or ultra-modern design of the latest Samsung or LG TVs, but this is far from an ugly television. Its silver plastic and metal construction looks pretty smart, and the colour-matched feet keep things simple and clean. It features moderately slim bezels around the screen and a small housing for the far-field microphones and ambient light sensor on the bottom bezel.
Unfortunately, the feet can be positioned only at the extremes of the set’s bottom edge, resulting in a footprint that will be far too wide for a lot of TV stands.
Core to the Omni QLED’s offering is the fact that it has all of the functionality of a Fire TV Stick built-in. That means you get a very intuitive user experience and a home screen that is absolutely packed with apps.
Thanks to the Omni QLED’s support for all current HDR standards (HLG, HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision), all apps deliver their HDR content in the way that they should. And, in fact, the TV supports HDR10+ Adaptive and Dolby Vision IQ, official versions of each format that automatically adjust according to the brightness and ambient light in a room.
Alexa is also heavily baked in, and you can navigate the entire OS using voice commands via the Alexa Voice Remote or far-field mics on the TV itself. The Fire OS software also features ‘Ambient Experience’ – a sort of glorified interactive screensaver paired with a sensor that detects when you are in the TV’s presence.
In terms of core picture hardware, the Omni TV is surprisingly well appointed. It’s a QLED TV, as the name suggests, which means it uses Quantum Dots in order to produce
