Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED (ML55F700) review

Despite Amazon doing very nicely for years now with its own range of Fire TV streaming devices, it was still a surprise when Amazon announced a couple of years back that it was launching its own range of TV sets. Shipping Amazon’s streaming services built into actual TV sets was quite the leap.

Even more surprising, though, is that previous Amazon TV ranges we’ve seen have tended to be pretty good. Or, at least, great value.

The brand’s latest TV series, though, is its most premium offering to date, turning to Mini LED lighting and a local dimming light system operating across hundreds of different zones to park its tanks on the mid-range lawns of the TV world’s more established TV brands.

The question is, can the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED take Amazon’s TV reputation to a whole new level, or will it turn out to be a step too far?

Price

Amazon’s TVs have always been aggressively priced, and that holds true with the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED. Its official price of £850 / $900 is already impressive, but you shouldn’t have to pay even that much, so frequent are Amazon’s discounts. At the time of writing, the TV is just £750 / $730, and we’ve seen it available in the past for as little as £650 / $700.

Such good value is the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED, in fact, that really direct competition is hard to find. The only really respectable 55-inch Mini LED rivals currently around for the same sort of money are TCL’s 2024 C805K series and Hisense’s U7N. Both of which are solid enough performers without being so good that they shut the door on any possibility of Amazon’s latest set competing with them.

Design

The 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED TV is really quite easy on the eye for such an affordable TV. The frame around the screen is trimmer than those of most budget TVs, and it boasts an appealing brushed silver finish that actually looks quite opulent and metallic from a regular viewing distance. Its desktop feet also enjoy a quite metallic look, as well as a quite dramatic arched shape.

It feels reasonably solidly built for such an affordable 55-inch TV, too, while the slenderness and flatness of its back panel make it a potentially attractive wall-hanging option.

The Omni Mini LED TVs ship with one of Amazon’s typical remote controls, which is no bad thing given that these remotes combine a comfortably slender shape with a minimal button count and pretty sensible layout. Plus, of course, the remote carries a mic button with which you can issue the TV with voice instructions and search terms to make more buttons on the remote unnecessary.

Features

The Fire TV Omni Mini LED helpfully includes two of its key features in its name. First, the Fire TV bit tells you that its smart system is Amazon’s long-running Fire TV system – a system that’s been around for so long and has appeared in so many devices now that it will be instantly familiar to many of today’s TV buyers.

Fire TV is one of the most content-rich smart systems around these days, carrying the vast majority of the world’s most popular streaming services – including the recently launched Freely service for live-streaming the broadcast services of many of the UK’s biggest broadcast channels. The extent to which Fire TVs tend to prioritise Amazon’s own Prime Video streaming service can be a little annoying at times, but that’s really only to be expected and these days isn’t much different to how Samsung and LG now heavily promote their respective streamed ‘channels’ on the homescreens of their TVs. Plus, you can customise the Fire TV’s menus to at least redress the balance a bit.

The other key feature revealed in this TV’s name, of course, is its Mini LED lighting system. Mini LEDs are far smaller than the regular LEDs still used to light most TVs at this price level, and they can help screens achieve tighter light control and, potentially, more brightness. That can be especially true when Mini LEDs are partnered – as they are in this case – by a local dimming system, where different zones of the TV’s backlight can be separately controlled to deliver more or less light wherever the image needs it.

It would be pretty cool to find even a basic local dimming system on the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED for its price. Actually, though, this Amazon TV’s local dimming system is anything but basic, sporting as it does a whopping 512 separate dimming zones (the 65-inch model ups this to 768). That’s a huge number for such an affordable TV and bodes very well for its picture quality. So long as the TV has the processing and image know-how to actually make that many zones work effectively, of course.

Also boding well for the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s performance are its Quantum Dot colour system and a VA-type LCD panel. VA panels typically deliver much better contrast than the alternative IPS type – albeit at the expense of more limited effective viewing angles.

The Fire TV Omni Mini LED has plenty of appeal for gamers, too. Its 120Hz panel can actually support games running at frame rates up to 144Hz for starters (provided you have a suitably capable PC and remember to manually activate the Gaming option in the TV’s connection menus), and its HDMIs also support VRR, including the AMD FreeSync Premium Pro format.

Input lag comes down to an impressively low 13.1ms with the TV set to its Game mode, too, and the set’s support for the Dolby Vision high dynamic range format extends to low-lag gaming as well as video.

Impressively, the Dolby Vision support is joined by support for the HDR10+, HDR10 and HLG HDR formats too, effectively meaning that Amazon’s TV can play the best available version of any video content you feed it. The presence of a built-in sensor means the set even supports the IQ version of Dolby Vision, where the pictures are automatically adjusted to retain a similar level of HDR impact no matter how much light there is in your room.

The 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED is well connected for its money. It has four HDMIs for starters, two capable of handling 120/144Hz games, and one with eARC audio support. There’s a digital audio output, too, as well as a single USB 3.0 port. On the wireless side, Bluetooth 5.0 and wi-fi streaming are both on board. This is a TV essentially built around Amazon’s online smart platform, after all. In fact, like its 65-inch sibling, the wi-fi system supports 6 GHz for smoother video streaming and more responsive online gaming – assuming your router is also up to the task.

Picture

The Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s pictures make a startlingly good first impression. For starters, they’re much (much) brighter than expected, instantly giving HDR content more of a lift over SDR than such an affordable TV would normally be expected to do. In fact, they look brighter when compared with the 55-inch competition than the 65-inch model did versus its 65-inch competition.

This brightness is especially noticeable in peak bright parts of the image, which glow with the sort of intensity many TVs costing twice as much won’t give you. But full-screen bright HDR content also looks significantly brighter, actually, than it does on any current OLED screen.

Even more surprisingly, the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s eye-catching brightness is accompanied by some really respectable handling of dark scenes and picture areas. Areas that should look black really do get pretty black, with impressively little sign of the ‘grey wash’ effect that can hang over dark scenes on most HDR TVs as affordable as this Amazon model is. Just as importantly, though, these unexpectedly credible blacks don’t come at the expense of lost shadow details and colour tones in the darkest picture areas as can happen with TVs that have less well-developed and controlled backlight systems.

Since the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED doesn’t join some rivals in dimming bright highlights of HDR pictures down when they appear against dark backgrounds, its combination of black levels and brightness serves up some serious punchy contrast – again delivering a startlingly expansive HDR experience for this level of the TV market.

The QLED colours, meanwhile, look vibrant and bold, feeding on the screen’s punchy brightness rather than being overwhelmed by it to the point where tones might have started to look faded or bleached. There’s also a more than respectable degree of subtlety in the way the Fire TV Omni Mini LED renders colours, helping it largely avoid colour banding/striping issues while contributing to a pleasingly three-dimensional and natural look to objects and skin tones (the latter being traditionally one of the most challenging things for relatively cheap TVs to get right).

In an ideal world the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s colours would retain a little more vibrancy and saturation in its relatively accurate Filmmaker Mode and Movie Bright picture presets. As with the 65-inch model, reds in particular can look a touch lacking in these settings unless you call in the TV’s Adaptive Colour feature (which, for reasons we’ll get to in a moment, we actually strongly advise you not to do…). We wouldn’t say this somewhat subdued red issue is bad enough to feel like a major distraction, especially as you tend to become attuned to it over time.

The Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s picture strengths prove a good fit for gaming, too. All that contrast and colour joins forces with a smooth and responsive experience to make HDR gaming in particular feel immersive and rewarding. And you certainly don’t feel as if anything the TV is doing is responsible for your gaming fails.

The only catches are that the 4K/120Hz and 144Hz feeds opened up by the Gaming option in the connections menu actually look noticeably less sharp and detailed than 4K/60Hz feeds, and that while the screen is responsive, motion across the screen can look a little soft.

This motion softness unfortunately doesn’t only affect gaming, either. You also feel its impact while watching films or TV shows, especially when you’re watching native 4K images, where the excellent clarity and sharpness of relatively static shots make the mushy look to fine details of moving objects or during camera pans stand out more.

Now we’ve strayed into negative territory, there are a couple of other issues to report. One is that while colours can be vivid and subtle in the set’s most punchy presets, they’re also weirdly inconsistent. This is especially true if you leave the TV’s Adaptive Colour feature in play. This feature supposedly uses AI to optimise colour saturations and tones for every shot and scene, but it’s so hyperactive and heavy-handed that it just ends up making colours look distractingly unstable. It can even sometimes clearly shift the image’s entire colour tone in the middle of a single shot/take, immediately ruining your immersion in what you’re watching.

Even without Adaptive Colour active, though, the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s colours aren’t consistent, sometimes shifting without any obvious rhyme or reason between different colour temperatures, especially with skin tones, as a film or TV show cuts from shot to shot.

One final smaller issue is that while the backlight system of Amazon’s most premium own-brand 55-inch TV is mostly surprisingly effective for the TV’s money, as with its 65-inch sibling it can leave some visible light blooming around bright HDR objects if they appear against a relatively dark backdrop. This isn’t really apparent with SDR viewing, and often takes the form of mild general cloudiness with shots and scenes that contain a mix of light and dark content rather than really in-your-face circles or blocks of extraneous light. But it’s noticeable to suggest that Amazon hasn’t totally nailed how to control the 512 dimming zones at the screen’s disposal.

While the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s issues are enough to prevent it earning a perfect score from us, though, it’s still good enough on balance to hold up as a real bargain for anyone keen to get a fairly full-blooded HDR experience without breaking the bank.

Sound

The aggressive and involving nature of the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s pictures is repeated with its audio.

For starters, this is a loud TV, capable of pumping out enough volume to make even action movie soundtracks feel compelling and fairly cinematic, though only of course by the generally low standards of integrated TV sound systems.

This raw power is delivered without pushing the speaker system to the point where it starts to sound strained or brittle, no matter how much pressure and density a climactic, explosion-packed movie moment might have. This ability to handle Hollywood’s heaviest moments without falling apart also means it has enough headroom to shift smoothly up and down a few gears as powerful movie soundtracks go through their constant ebb and flow.

The speaker’s power helps to drive the Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s sound out and away from the TV’s bodywork quite handily, too, ensuring there’s a good sense of scale as well as raw volume to the soundstage. This large staging even includes a hint of height when listening to Dolby Atmos soundtracks.

Detailing is impressive, and the subwoofer built into the Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s rear adds some real low-frequency presence to the more than solid work of the main stereo speakers without succumbing to distortions or crackles.

As with the 65-inch model’s sound, though, the 55 Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s subwoofer does sound a bit low-fi compared to the clarity of the main speakers. There are a couple of other audio limitations too, namely that male voices can sometimes sound a bit forced and hummy, and voices and some other centre channel effects can sometimes feel rather locked into a small area under the middle of the screen.

Overall, though, the 55-inch Fire TV Omni Mini LED’s sound is at least on if not slightly above par for its price.

Verdict

While it’s a little rough around the edges in places, overall Amazon’s latest and most premium 55-inch TV has more going for it on both the feature and performance fronts to make it another genuine bargain.

• Picture 4
• Sound 4
• Features 5

MORE:

Read our review of the Hisense 55U7N

Also consider the TCL 55C805K

Read our 65-inch Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini LED review

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