The Mini LED TV market is always a battleground, with big name players including Hisense, TCL, Samsung, Sony and Panasonic all pushing hard to dominate the space.
But during the latest skirmish, after weeks of testing, it was a plucky new product from Amazon that impressed me, and the wider home cinema reviews team, enough to carve a space in our best Mini LED buying guide.
Specifically, the 65-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED dethroned the Hisense U7N as our recommended best value Mini LED TV.
Why? The answer’s pretty simple, it performed the best at its price when we ran it head-to-head with its rivals in our dedicated viewing rooms.
Holistically, the TV offered a wonderfully bright, but accurate picture that never tried too hard with its processing or contrast, resulting in a pleasingly consistent movie watching experience.
This is a big deal as trying too hard is a key issue I’ve experienced and documented reviewing Mini LED TVs many times before.
To catch you up, many either boost contrast to the point dark detail is lost in a bid to overcome Mini LED sets’ inability to match OLED TV’s perfect back levels.
Or they go to the other extreme and get too focussed on showing off their main selling point – their incredibly high peak brightness levels. Here they raise the backlight too high, making images lose dynamic range and look a little flat.
None of this happened on the Fire TV Mini LED, which seemed to accept its weaknesses and offer a wonderfully uniform performance that let us focus on the movie, not what it was doing. Hence our conclusion:
“The Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED is a solid set for buyers ready to take their first jump from a basic LED into the mid-range TV market. Offering clear improvements on the base Omni QLED, it gets a lot right thanks to its focus on never pushing itself too hard.”
So why didn’t it get a four, not perfect five-star, rating? There are a few reasons. First, is that while the picture is great for the price, it isn’t perfect. The TV can play it a little too safe in some instances.
Watching Blade Runner 2049 during the opening dark scene, reds looked under-represented, with Sapper Morton’s skin in particular looking a little flat. The same was true when we tested the TV with our It 4k Blu-ray. Georgie’s iconic yellow rain coat didn’t pop out of the otherwise grey backdrop as it should.
Second, while it is the best of its kind, it’s still a four star product. We’d also note that the margin between it and the Hisense U7N is very small. The only reason the Amazon beat it is its more mature light control, with the Hisense suffering from noticeably more bloom during our checks – this is where there’s a halo around bright sections of the picture directly next to dark segments.
Third is its middling audio. Despite having a built in 2.1 speaker system, the sub isn't powerful enough to truly immerse you and there's not any sense of directionality. You will need to invest in a separate soundbar or speaker package for the best results possible.
But, those caveats aside, the Amazon is the best value Mini LED TV money can buy right now and one we’re thoroughly happy to recommend, especially to buyers still on older basic LED sets.
MORE:
These are the best 65-inch TVs we’ve tested
We rate the best soundbars money can buy
Our picks of the best cheap TVs
