what's next a Kirkland Signature gaming PC I mean come on it's one thing if
Amazon wants to shamelessly rip off someone's messenger bag but engineering
a big screen TV is a little more complicated than cutting up someone
else's turning it into a blueprint and assembling your own which is why they
didn't but the Fire TV on new series appears to serve a very similar purpose
it's been contract manufactured by someone hopefully we can figure out who
by the end of this video and exist specifically for Amazon to compete
directly with its Partners offering low everyday prices and already aggressive
deals during promotional periods like Black Friday the only question to answer
before millions of you rushed out to buy one then is does it totally suck thanks
to Ting mobile for sponsoring today's video Ting mobile is a customer focused
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all right you got me it's not quite
Amazon Basics but the Fire TV 75 at
Johnny is still pretty basic it takes
all the most important boxes 4K 60hz HDMI 2.1 with e-arc HDR with Dolby
Vision support voice control with aliexa and support for pretty much any app that
you'd want but if you were expecting anything more extra like ultra thin
bezels support for variable refresh rate or a comprehensive color calibration
menu then you won't need to waste your time checking out our links down below
for everyone else once you make it past the initial setup prompting you for your
Amazon account regular Amazon Fire stick users will find themselves feeling very
much at home you've got your main apps Amazon specifically calls out Dolby
Vision support for Disney plus Netflix and Prime video and then along the top
you've got a dumpster fire
literally 40 of the home screen is taken
up by ads fortunately the navigation isn't the worst but all the stuff you
care about is in this little thin bar and then the options will populate below
as you navigate through one weird Quirk we ran into during testing was that
picture settings weren't giving us anything other than a brightness option
out of the box we're not sure how or
when that got fixed maybe installing some apps Force an update or something
but it seems okay now let's have a look at i o we've got USB type a Ethernet it
doesn't say how fast but based on the fact that it's speed tested slower than
the onboard Wi-Fi I don't think we'll be streaming any original quality Blu-ray
rips and Plex there's a jack for the included IR receiver this is pretty nice
if you don't want to have to aim your remote right at the TV you can just run
it off somewhere else a digital optical audio port three HDMI 2.0 ports and then
a fourth HDMI 2.1 Port now you might wonder why Amazon bothered with HDMI 2.1
if the panel is 60 hertz but being able
to take advantage of e-arc to pass Dolby Atmos audio to your receiver or Soundbar
is a pretty good nice to have just like it's nice to have this sweet sweet party
shirt from ltdstore.com and like it's nice to have accurate
colors on your TV we're not sure where Amazon is sourcing these panels and our
contact at Portrait isn't sure all right so Linus asked me to take apart the Fire
TV and do some digging this thing is huge so I got a hand from one of our new
hires and Logistics we got it apart and started searching up the backlight
controllers as well as the like LCD pixel controller board and basically
every code we searched came back as TCL so we're pretty sure that's what we're
dealing with here Amazon bought either finished TVs or at least a bunch of
parts from TCL slapped their logo on the housing integrated fire stick and put it
in the box and on the shelves but what I do know is that out of the box our
sample was not very impressive in
standard mode color accuracy hit an average Delta e of 12.6 with primary
colors like red green and blue doing all right but anything in between dipping
off significantly to put that in context anything over a Delta e of 2 is going to
be noticeable to the human eye however putting the display into movie mode
drastically improved matters we got a very decent average Delta e of 2 with a
Max of five and a half not bad the main
points of failure were blues and Grays while red and green were pretty spot on
as for HDR accuracy again in movie mode
it's not great but it's markedly improved with our average without
luminance error getting cut in half so if you care about watching content as it
was intended to be viewed you're not going to want to have this thing in any picture mode other than movie although
you still might not be getting the full experience it's not particularly bright
at least in SDR we measured a peak luminance of 277 Candela per meter
squared for those of you unaware knits and Candela per meter squared are
basically interchangeable values so unless we're talking about an enormous
projection screen less than 300 nits ain't that bright and unfortunately in
spite of all the marketing noise made about it the HDR experience is not a
whole lot better our Fire TV only reached about 430 nits Peak brightness
which sounds better when compared to the
peak SDR brightness we achieved but here's the thing brighter whites that
come at the cost of turning all the dark parts of the screen gray do not an HDR
image make and the Fire TV Omni is simply not equipped for decent HDR
performance the thing is modern IPS and VA type panels rely on a technology
called full array local dimming where the backlight shining through the panel
selectively dims or boosts its light output in zones depending on the content
being displayed in each zone so this thing we're looking at right here you'd
want to turn down the backlight at the bottom and turn it up at the top so the
stars shine nice and bright and if the significant backlight bleed in the
corners and along the bottom Edge is anything to go by you won't find that
technology here making this TV yet another notch in our HDR and belt and of
course adding insult to injury our color accuracy was significantly worse when
testing HDR I say that you know it'll necessarily be
noticeable the real world right
oh that's super annoying yeah so I don't so the stupid thing where we can only
adjust the back light in the settings menu is back when it's not on a source
if it's absent video you can't adjust it
we had a whole paragraph about how inconvenient this is because on a TV
where you are going to be wanting to adjust your picture settings you can't
be looking at content while you make your tweaks like what's the point of
getting something with a Fire TV built in and then you have to go buy an NVIDIA
Shield anyway so that you can actually run in the right picture profile
so when contents actually playing you
can change what to clarify it has this
Dynamic backlight feature so that will adjust the entire backlight's brightness
depending on the scene but that will not help you with HDR good Lord this thing
is not very bright oh my God I can't even see anything so
much for the dynamic contrast or dynamic backlight so now the whole image is just
Gray we get HDR signal but that is not HDR
like all the detail in the dark parts of the scene is completely lost you can
kind of get the specular highlights off of toothless's scales and stuff like
that but they're not bright it's not HDR they don't Sparkle like the white dragon
the light Fury you're supposed to really see like glinting off of the white
scales and stuff like that it's not there and what I opened this up to talk
about which is color accuracy it's not overcooking greens or Reds or any of the
things I would normally look for in a cheaper TV
it's actually like really solid as far as the color goes I think this is just
an expectations problem for Amazon if they didn't talk so much about the Dolby
Vision compatibility in HDR I'd be looking at this going okay I want
to talk about gaming it's an LCD panel so we don't have to worry about burning
but how does it actually feel
well one thing I can tell you is whatever you do don't leave it in
anything but game mode for gaming or you're going to have a seriously bad
time when it comes to input latency oh I guess I get to try that now yeah oh
fantastic holy bananas
that is horrendous I mean you guys can
probably see this through the camera we don't even need a high speed camera watch this watch this look at that delay
it's exactly as bad as I expected it to be based on the desktop
you just cannot react to things quickly like this
game oh that's so much better
yeah that that feels that feels very
better man everything looks so dull though we
can try turning on their Dynamic backlight again no yeah it just really
doesn't look that good for a thousand dollar TV I'm sorry like I know it's big
but you still like might as well just get the TCL or the Vizio like
yeah in standard picture mode which is
what it comes set to default and what I'm playing in right now we measured an
average click to Photon latency of 139 milliseconds using our NVIDIA ldat
that's not just bad that is outright unplayable in games that require precise
inputs like Super Meat Boy and fixing
the issue ended up being kind of confusing you see normally picture mode
just applies presets to color tint
saturation that sort of thing but here the game picture profile which a lot of
the time will do stupid stuff like boosting up dark parts of the scene also
enables low latency processing which puts us all the way down to an average
of 29 milliseconds from click to Photon that is pretty darn good now to be clear
many TVs these days do have a game mode setting to help reduce latency it's just
usually or at least on good TVs it's its
own setting and not built into the picture profile
both of our tests were using CS go running at around 280 frames per second
which is much faster than our 60hz panel can take advantage of and honestly
um this is funny before we redid our colored measurements in movie mode we
said you should just leave it in this mode because the accuracy is no different from standard but you're going
to want to be flipping back between movie mode and game mode depending on
what you're doing although I would probably make the argument you shouldn't
be flipping back and forth between either of them because you just
shouldn't buy this TV which raises a pretty big question
lioness why are there so many five-star
reviews for this thing are you just being a hater well no offense but
there's a reason that the people giving this thing 5 Star reviews are School
teachers or bus drivers or lawyers or whatever else it is that they do rather
than Tech reviewers I mean I don't doubt that it's a lot better than their old TV
that's kind of how technology goes but compared to other options that you can
get in this same price range like this TCL 5 series Roku TV that does have
local dimming or this Vizio M series with AirPlay Chromecast variable refresh
rate and local dimming the Fire TV Omni really struggles to stand out I mean
maybe if you're really into Amazon's Special Sauce features like the
microphone which thankfully includes a physical disable switch or the webcam
support for video chat which is coming in a future update and AirPlay support
which is also coming in a future update then I guess maybe you could kind of
justify it but for my part I think it's fair to say that Kirkland probably would
have done it better luck next year Amazon privacy lets you
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are you looking for a new TV love Amazon hate Amazon let us know in the comments
and if you like this video be sure to check out our video on the skyworth 55xc
9000 a 65-inch OLED display that you can
actually get for less than what this thing costs and the brightness isn't even actually
that much worse even though it's OLED
yeah this thing's sort of poo poo