Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Amazon turns to the bright side

The Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED has a lot to live up to as the successor to the brand’s five-star, quantum dot-powered TV, the Amazon Fire TV Omni QLED.

It seeks to take picture quality to another level by swapping out basic LEDs for Mini LEDs and does so pretty effectively overall. I came across a few image issues while testing it, but Amazon’s new flagship is an appealing Mini LED option with great brightness, hundreds of dimmable zones, a content-rich smart system and a competitive price tag.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Key specifications

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: What you need to know

The Fire TV Omni Mini LED is Amazon’s most premium own-brand TV to date, a status it earns by using Mini LED lighting backed up by quantum dot colour and a local dimming system that operates across more than 500 separately controlled zones.

Somewhat surprisingly, it supports 4K gaming right up to 144Hz, while its premium features are joined by Amazon’s familiar Fire TV smart system, complete with pretty much every streaming service known to man.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Price and competition

Amazon’s 55in, 65in and 75in Fire TV Omni Mini LED TVs cost £750, £950 and £1,200 respectively. These are all fairly aggressive prices for TVs equipped with the sort of features and specifications all three carry.

Samsung’s Q80D range is available for slightly less. These TVs don’t use Mini LED lighting but do feature Samsung’s impressive processing and content-rich Tizen smart system, as well as delivering on Samsung’s strong reputation for picture quality. You can step up to the Mini LED version of the Q80D, the QN85D, for around £200 more.

If you can live without Mini LEDs and with fewer dimming zones to save money, Amazon’s own Fire TV Omni QLED TVs deliver impressive performance and features for their money, and can now be had for as little as £500 for the 55in model.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Design, connections and control

The Fire TV Omni Mini LED looks very pleasant for such an affordable TV. The brushed metal trim that wraps around the outer edge of the 55in model I’m reviewing here is particularly eye-catching, build quality is solid and the rear panel lends itself well to wall hanging. The provided feet are more functional than stylish but are thin enough to barely be noticeable when viewing the TV head-on.

The available connections are very respectable for the money. There are four HDMI ports, two of which support HDMI 2.1 features including 4K@120Hz and 4K@144Hz, auto low latency mode switching and variable refresh rates.

There are also ports for an IR Emitter and headphones, and an RF antenna to remind us that for all the focus on Fire TV smarts and streaming, the Fire TV Omni Mini LED does still carry a Freeview HD tuner.

Amazon’s new premium TVs ship with one of the brand’s familiar remote controls, complete with a stripped-back but still effective button count and a mic button you can use to summon Amazon Alexa. You can also address the TV directly courtesy of a far-field mic in the TV.

One last control option is the Luna controller Amazon has designed to work with the online game service it now offers with its Fire TV products.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Smart TV platform

You won’t be surprised to learn that the Fire TV Omni Mini LED uses Amazon’s Fire TV operating system, which you may be familiar with from the retail giant’s Fire TV Sticks.

If it’s new to you, rest assured there’s nothing to fear about it. Its inevitable bias towards Amazon Prime Video and various affiliated services takes a bit of getting used to but it won’t be long before you’re familiar with the full bounty of streaming options available.

These include Apple TV+, Netflix, Disney+, YouTube and even Freely, with which you can live stream many of the free-to-air channels available on the Freeview HD broadcast service. The Fire TV homepage supports a reasonable degree of customisation, too, and the system makes fairly sensible content recommendations based on your viewing history.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Image quality

Amazon hasn’t been shy about putting its new Mini LED lighting and 512 (counted and confirmed) local dimming zones to good use in pumping out serious levels of brightness. Even in the Standard SDR picture preset the Omni Mini LED delivers light peaks as high as 670cd/m².

Even the Filmmaker Mode can’t resist tapping into the screen’s high (for this level of the market, anyway) brightness. This sees it stray slightly outside the Delta E error level of three required to ensure that deviations from the established Rec 709 mastering standard aren’t visible to the human eye.

Measurements taken using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and C6 5000 colorimeter, show Delta E errors of 5.1 on average for multipoint greyscale, 5.2 for colour point accuracy and 5.9 and 4.6 for saturation and luminance sweeps respectively. None of these measurements are way off where they would ideally be, and I suspect at least some Fire TV Omni Mini LED buyers will welcome the slight extra punch the TVs’ Filmmaker Mode carries.

That said, many of this TV’s audience will likely be unable to resist the Standard preset, which delivers bright images with a potent colour palette. There’s enough subtlety in the way small tonal shifts and blends are delivered on the Fire TV Omni Mini LED to create a picture that feels decently sharp, even when it’s been upscaled from HD.

The upscaling doesn’t seem to introduce any strong colour errors and does a decent job of distinguishing between noise and ‘real’ source picture information as it goes about adding all the necessary pixels to an HD or even SD signal.

The Omni Mini LED’s local dimming engine copes pretty effortlessly with dark SDR scenes. Black colours look deep and consistent, with minimal greyness hanging over them and no major evidence of clouding or haloing around stand-out bright objects.

There are a couple of things that slightly spoil the SDR mood, though. Namely the rather soft-looking motion, and some peculiar colour inconsistency that finds tones floating from scene to scene and even shot to shot, no matter what picture preset you’re using.

The motion blur doesn’t seem to be fixable by any of the picture settings Amazon has provided, with every setting looking either a bit soft or overly processed. And while you make the colour inconsistency substantially worse if you leave the Adaptive Colour setting in the Intelligent Picture settings menu on, nothing I tried solved the issue.

These issues don’t stop the Omni Mini LED from still being a good SDR performer for its money – but they do mean it’s not quite a great one.

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Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: HDR picture quality

Watching HDR quite literally gives this TV a chance to shine. My Calman Ultimate tests reveal that the TV can hit brightness peaks beyond 1,100cd/m² – a seriously high figure for a range that starts at £750.

This allows HDR to enjoy a big lift in overall intensity compared with the TV’s already punchy SDR presentation. The benefits are felt for both small, bright highlights and scenes where HDR brightness floods the whole frame.

The quantum dot colour system laps up the extra brightness available to it in HDR mode, too. The screen covers more than 95% of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum typically used for HDR mastering and pumps out some quite fierce saturations in most of the TV’s presets. Much of the time these saturations are balanced and nuanced enough to still feel credible and immersive despite the high levels of potency the TV is pumping into them.

Calman Ultimate’s HDR Colour Checker and Colour Match tests find the Omni Mini LED getting closer to DCI-P3 standards on the Delta E scale than they get to Rec709 standards with SDR playback (in Filmmaker Mode, at least).

The sharpness Amazon’s Mini LED TV delivers when its motion handling isn’t getting in the way, meanwhile, is even more pronounced thanks to the extra light range and contrast HDR unlocks.
Good contrast isn’t just about brightness, of course; it depends on a TV handling dark scenes and black levels well too. Here, the surprisingly high-level local dimming system works very well.

Black levels remain unusually deep for such an affordable TV, despite the fairly intense bright highlights they can find themselves partnered with. There’s still enough shadow detail in the darkest corners to ensure that the darkness the TV produces feels natural rather than forced or hollow.

There are more signs of backlight blooming with HDR than you get with SDR, however. The aggressively mastered mixture of light and dark elements during the Hollywood mansion party that opens Damien Chazelle’s Babylon proves particularly challenging to the Omni Mini LED, and other HDR movies can look a touch cloudy at times, too. I should stress that clouding doesn’t crop up often or potently enough to stop the Omni Mini LED from being a good handler of dark scenes for the money.

Impressively, the Amazon Fire Omni Mini LED TV supports all of the main four high dynamic range formats, adding playback of Dolby Vision and HDR10+ to the basic HDR10 and HLG flavours. There’s even support for the so-called ‘IQ’ and ‘Adaptive’ versions of Dolby Vision and HDR10+, where input from an ambient light sensor is used to adjust the HDR output to suit your room conditions.

Dolby Vision is particularly useful, helping the TV deliver more colour consistency than it achieves with any of the other supported image formats.

Unfortunately, the motion and colour inconsistency issues noticed with SDR footage are even more pronounced with 4K HDR. The extra resolution makes the motion blur stand out more, while the struggle to retain a consistent colour tone becomes more difficult with HDR’s wider gamut. Especially when it comes to skin tones, which shift between looking a bit green to looking a bit orange or peaky. The bizarre Adaptive Colour feature’s distracting inconsistencies are even more extreme with HDR, too, so it’s even more important to turn this off.

For all the TV’s inconsistencies, HDR pictures still look punchy and enjoyable – especially in typical living room brightness levels. But again we only ultimately end up in good rather than great territory.

To test the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED we used Portrait Displays Calman colour calibration software.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Gaming

The Fire TV Omni Mini LED is an enjoyable gaming TV. Its fondness for brightness, vibrant colours and strong contrast plays right into the gaming wheelhouse and HD and 4K games look impressively engaging.

Support for frame rates up to 144Hz over two of the four HDMI ports is handy, while input lag of just 13.1ms in Game mode and VRR support make gaming feel fluid and reactive. The 120Hz/144Hz support is only available in 4K if you activate a dedicated gaming setting in the TV’s connection menus. Otherwise, you’re limited to 4K/60Hz or 1080p/120Hz.

However, whatever trickery Amazon is using to make 4K/120Hz, and more, possible leaves the resulting pictures looking a bit softer than they look if you stick with the TV’s ‘basic’ HDMI settings. The rather soft-looking motion can take the edge off the gaming experience too, especially with 60Hz or lower titles.

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Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Sound quality

Amazon has equipped the Fire TV Omni Mini LED with a 2.1-channel speaker system, complete with a subwoofer built into the rear and the ability to decode and play Dolby Atmos soundtracks. And it sounds rather good.

The TV can get good and loud, and projects that volume a good distance away from its panel. There’s even a vague sense of height to be heard with Atmos mixes, and other effects are placed with a fair degree of clarity and accuracy around the soundstage.

Detailing is high, too. I became aware of the noises being made by a pet bird in Billy’s bedroom during the opening scenes of Andy Muschietti’s first It film that I’d never noticed before, despite watching this scene dozens of times. Sometimes subtle details can sound a little too bright in the mix but they do so without sounding harsh or shrill.

The integrated subwoofer is a bit of a blunt instrument, in that its sound is noticeably coarser and less responsive than the efforts of the other two speakers. But it’s reasonably eager to kick in when a soundtrack requires it and reaches low enough and emanates loudly enough to add a least a rough sense of cinematic heft to action scenes. It doesn’t succumb to sharp crackles or other distortions even when the low frequency going gets tough, either.

The main flaw with the Omni Mini LED’s sound is that vocals tend to sound a bit thick, over-stressed and in marked opposition to the clean details heard elsewhere.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review: Verdict

There’s a lot to like about Amazon’s new Fire TV Omni Mini LED television. Its Fire TV smart system plays host to a huge range of easily accessed content, and the Mini LED backlight, quantum dot colours and more than 500 dimming zones are put to proper use.

However, the eye-catching brightness contrast and colour the Omni Mini LED manages to reach is undermined just enough by motion softness and colour inconsistency to cost the set a star.