Solid budget TV let down by FireOS

After unboxing the 2023 Omni TV, I was impressed with how great the contrast was for a television with an LED backlight. The light bleed was controlled well and the colours were great at first glance. Over the last few weeks, it’s been a fine screen to watch movies and play games on, but I’ve had to fight to calibrate it a little more than I would like.

The more I used the unit, the more I got annoyed by the quirks of the Fire TV operating system. Its unpredictable and overly complex nature made it a pretty bad experience. Not to mention how much it pushes ads at you. You can get a lot out of it since it’s a very capable Android TV, but at the same time, the software design drove me mad.

At the end of the day, this is a really solid TV, but there are a lot of awesome TVs for similar prices, and while I haven’t tested all of them, it seems like TCL and Hisense still have the most value.

The picture isn’t quite worth a thousand words, but it’s pretty good for the price

As I mentioned above, the picture quality is quite good because the TV has excellent contrast and can get quite bright. It’s not OLED levels of deep blacks, but it’s quite pleasing and above average for LED-lit TVs. It also supports Dolby Vision HDR content which looks great on this TV, but I did find some issues with colour accuracy when gaming in Dolby Vision on my Xbox Series X.

For some reason, when the TV defaults to game mode, it can lock the HDMI port down to ‘enhanced’ mode, which makes it impossible to tweak a lot of settings like the motion smoothing and other picture adjustments. Then, to make matters worse, the colours get overly vivid and too saturated. Reds can look more orange, greens get more yellow and overall, it’s not a great picture. I was able to remedy this by dropping out of HDR and unlocking the port so it went back to ‘Standard’ mode, but it’s a bit annoying that the automatic settings on the TV just made things worse. While I like spending ten minutes fiddling around with the TV’s colours, it’s not something I expect the average person to enjoy doing.

One feature I did end up liking was a setting that reduces colour banding across low-bitrate content. This is that stair-step colour effect you might see if you’re streaming on YouTube or other low-quality services. My internet has been really bad since I moved and I’ve been dealing with low-quality content a lot, so this setting has helped clean them up a bit, which I’m thankful for.

Surprisingly, the speakers match the quality of the screen and are above average. It might not be as directional as a good soundbar, but it gets loud, has a decent amount of bass and the vocals are quite clear. Whether you’re watching movies or listening to music, I think most people upgrading from an older TV will find these speakers a solid upgrade. Since the TV has built-in Alexa microphones, you can also ask it to play music with ease.

One issue I had with this was how poorly it handled reflections. Compared to my older TCL TV and my friend’s LG NanoCell model, this Amazon one looked the worst when playing dark scenes in a bright room. When the screen is well-lit you can’t see it at all, but it is something to be aware of.

I had to edit this picture to be very dim so the camera would pick up the gridlines. In reality, this looks more like the image at the top of the page in terms of lighting.

When it’s lit can also present another rare issue. Sometimes, when you’re panning across a screen with uniform colours, like the map of a video game, you can see the hotspots and shadows of the backlight array grid. It’s very subtle, but it appears as you pan a static image across the screen and is distracting. That said, reading through lots of other reviews, I’ve been unable to find anyone else with this particular issue, so it might be something with my unit.

FireOS built-in is annoying

I’d kill for a proper input select button.

I use a Fire TV Cube on my TV in my bedroom since it has a fast processor to get through heavy Plex files, but when it’s built into the TV it’s a whole other can of worms. And if you’re wondering the TV’s built-in processor can’t play lossless Plex files so you will need an external box if you’re into that.

First off, every time you wake this TV from sleep, it opens to the home screen which makes sense. However, when you try to scroll left or right, you’ll realize that the TV defaulted your cursor on the ads. So, every time I turn on the TV, I usually scroll through at least two of these before I can overcome the startup lag and scroll down to the main content.

The annoyance doesn’t end there because when you scroll down, the first thing you select is the home button. Why? I have no idea because I’m already on the home screen so this button does nothing. Then, you need to either scroll to the left to select an input, or right to get to your top apps. I get that TVs need to show us ads now, but making me scroll through them because of a shady entry flow is just scummy. And on top of all this, the actual homescreen never recommended anything that I’d actually watch, making the whole screen redundant, unless the content appearing on it is sponsored, which makes it just another page of ads. If you scroll past the sponsored stuff you can get to your recent apps this way, but it’s just terrible design.

This second problem also applies to lots of other new smart TVs, but I wish we could calibrate each input from the main settings instead of having to play content, and then adjust from a sub-menu. I also find it confusing to have so many Dolby Vision presets and not be able to tweak any of them. I get that Dolby likes to control its software stack, but there’s no way it intended for reds to look this orange on some content. The world is just too unpredictable to lock everything down like this. Building on this, each app is treated as its own input so you need to tweak the settings separately for Netflix, Prime Video, Crave, Plex, etc. Considering I just watch movies there, it would be great to apply the same preset to each one without having to manually calibrate it each time I start a new app.

As you get more used to the TV, you can find shortcuts around some of the annoying parts, but for the most part, it feels bloated, and the ‘clicky’ navigation sound makes this whole thing feel low-budget (you can turn the sound off, thankfully).

You can also use Alexa voice commands and those are handy if you don’t already have a smart speaker in your room. However, I could never quite get over my muscle memory to reach for the remote so I rarely used voice controls to swap inputs, change the volume or pause content. If you do like talking to your TV, though, it does work. If you don’t, you can disable the microphones.

There is a unique motion sensor on this TV so it can know to wake up when you enter a room and start playing the screensaver. This is pretty cool, but unless you use voice controls, there isn’t much point since you need to pick up the remote to navigate the TV’s operating system and play content anyways. However, other times it is nice for it to wake up letting me quickly check the time or weather. Amazon also has a small collection of high-quality screen savers, but they’re rather limited at the end of the day so you see the same ones often. Compared to most TVs, they’re above the average, but it’s still not quite as entertaining as the iconic Apple TV screensavers.

The perfect secondary TV?

At the end of the day, Amazon’s sale price of $650 for this set feels fair. It’s a really good budget TV. When it functions well, it’s great. However, you might want to consider yourself an expert TV wrangler if you want to wade through its annoying settings.

Is Fire OS annoying to use, but functional enough software to turn you off of a cheap TV? That will be up to you, and I think for anyone needing a second TV in their house or college kids moving out for the first time, this is a great option. Would I put it front and centre in my main home theatre? No, but in a bedroom or a garage it will fit in great. Since the built-in speakers are so good, you also shouldn’t need to add sound equipment either.

I tested out the 55-inch version of the Omni TV from 2023 which retails for $799 but I’ve seen it on sale many times over this review period for as cheap as $640. There is a more expensive Amazon TV that costs but seems to be on sale for around $900 quite often which is more positively reviewed if you want an upgraded panel.