Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED Review

The Omni QLED is a smart home device that happens to show pictures, and it is much easier to like on that basis. The Fire TV software is the quickest version Amazon has shipped, far snappier than the same interface on a streaming stick, and the ambient mode that turns an idle screen into a photo frame or a household notice board is the most useful version of that idea anyone has built.

Hands free voice control works from across a room. Quantum dots give it decent color, full array dimming gives it real black levels for the money, and in a dark room with a film running it looks perfectly respectable. The picture runs out of room fast. Peak brightness tops out low enough that HDR barely registers as HDR, the dimming algorithm is slow and visibly lifts whole regions of the screen when it should be holding them down, and the panel is 60Hz with no full bandwidth inputs, so a current console never reaches the frame rate it is capable of.

Hisense and TCL both hand you a brighter, better dimmed picture at the same money and better gaming support with it. Buy this if the Alexa wired house is the point. Buy almost anything else if the screen is.