Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED review: another step forward for Amazon

It’s become almost impossible to avoid Amazon, be it as a shopping destination or the devices that populate our homes. While Alexa devices and Fire TV sticks have been around now for a decade, its first Amazon-built smart TV didn’t become available until 2021. Just like any other Alexa device, the Omni TVs integrated flawlessly into an Amazon ecosystem and could act as the hub of your smart home.

The new Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED continues in that tradition. It has Fire TV Ambient Experience — Amazon first included it with the Fire TV Omni QLED — which now has an interactive feature (an early preview of the feature was included on my review sample). Using the TV’s built-in radar sensor, your able to use movements to affect the artwork. For instance, bring your hand close to the image of koi fish swimming in a pond, and the fish will gather around your hand as if you’re feeding them. Or wave your hand near some butterflies, and they’ll fly away to other flowers on the screen.

There’s the option of adding images and art to display your own photo gallery, or create AI art with the generative AI Titan Image Generator using prompts you can say into the voice remote. Also, like Samsung’s The Frame or the new CanvasTV from Hisense and Nxtframe TV from TCL, the Omni Mini-LED has access to an ever-growing curated collection of over 2,000 pieces of art that can be displayed on the TV.

In addition to your regular Alexa devices, the Omni can also connect to your Ring devices, or other smart home devices (such as a thermostat) to control your whole home system. The Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED is designed to not only be be the center of your living room but the control center of your entire Alexa smart home system. It’s a full Amazon experience.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED specs

Much like the last Omni QLED looked like a TCL 5-Series, the Omni Mini-LED looks like a TCL Q6, with the same somewhat chunky frame shape and TCL-style legs. There’s a small bump under the Fire TV badge on the bottom bezel where the IR sensor is housed, as well as a physical mic shutoff switch if you don’t want your TV listening all the time.

One excellent aspect of those TCL-style legs is the amount of height it provides for a soundbar, if you choose to add one. I will say that the sound system performs pretty well. It’s missing the bass response I’d want for a Hollywood blockbuster, but dialogue clarity is good. Still, I’d take advantage of the 3.5 inches of space below the TV for a soundbar to beef things up even more.

The Omni Mini-LED comes with Amazon’s Alexa Voice Remote Enhanced instead of the Pro version (the Pro includes two customizable buttons, remote finder, a headphones button for pairing Bluetooth headphones, and backlit buttons). You can purchase the Pro for $35, and while the included remote is fine, I wish the backlit version were included.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED: numbers for nit nerds

As the name suggests, the major addition to the Omni this year is mini-LED technology. The series uses between 512 and 1,344 dimming zones, depending on size (our 65-inch sample had 768 dimming zones). It’s not as much as the competition (this will be a running theme), but what’s more important than the number is what is done with them. With Local Dimming set to High, the Omni Mini-LED does a great job handling blooming of bright images surrounded by black space. There’s a bit of bleed from subtitles, but in dark scenes — like the Millennium Falcon flying through the Maw in Solo — the TV’s processing keeps that light wrangled in.

I measured the Omni Mini-LED with a Portrait Displays C6 HDR5000 colorimeter profiled to an X-rite i1 Pro 3 spectrophotometer, a Murideo Seven-G 8K pattern generator, and Calman calibration software. With factory settings, the Filmmaker mode in both SDR and HDR was the most accurate, although they both also had the same issue — the lower half of the grayscale curve was darker than it should have been. While Filmmaker was the most accurate mode, Movie Bright was the brightest, reaching 933 nits in SDR and just over 1,600 nits in HDR. This is a significant increase over the previous model, making HDR pop. Even in Filmmaker, HDR is still able to reach 1,230 nits.

Using out of the box Filmmaker settings in SDR, the color temperature is on the cool side as grayscale gets whiter with peak luminance hitting 763 nits. By bringing the Backlight setting down to zero, luminance maxes out at 142 nits — within the 100-200 nit target range for SDR. Bringing the luminance down to this level also evens out the color temperature across grayscale (although gamma is still high, meaning midtone grays are still a little darker than they should be).

Still, what’s most important is how it looks with real content, and overall the Omni Mini-LED does a good job. HDR in particular is dynamic, with specular highlights providing nice vibrancy to scenes. Detail of faces and Luv’s intricate nail designs in Blade Runner 2049 are excellent. The TV struggles a little bit with SDR upscaling, especially in dark scenes where I saw some posterization in the shadows, but for the most part it isn’t too distracting.

Amazon Fire TV OS holds it back

As I mentioned earlier, the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED is an Amazon experience through and though. If you’re looking at purchasing this TV, that’s probably what you’re after, but it’s also what holds the TV back. The Fire TV OS is easily its worst feature.

To start, the TV is always trying to sell you something — and sometimes it almost feels like its trying to trick you into signing up for a service. As is a part of every TV setup, you need to install apps that weren’t already pre-installed (interestingly, Amazon Prime Video was not one of the pre-installed apps). For the most part, finding and adding apps is easy. You search for it, select it, and then choose the default option of downloading it.

Apple TV+ was one that I needed to install, and the process was slightly different. Instead of the default option being to install the app, it was to “Start 1-week free trial & get app.” I had to scroll over in order to get the option to only download the app. If I hadn’t been paying attention, I very easily could have subscribed to an additional Apple TV+ account through Amazon and after the trial get automatically charged for it on my Amazon account. I don’t think this is Amazon trying to trick you into subscribing to a service you already have, but I could see that happening to someone rather easily.

Beyond the multiple asks during setup to sign up for different services, there’s sponsored content everywhere. The top half of the home screen has a carousel of different promoted shows — some on free services, some available to buy or rent, some that require a subscription service you don’t have yet. There’s a banner a few rows down that advertises more sponsored content (watching Cops on PlutoTV, for example). Further down the list are rows labeled “Recommended free movies and TV shows,” or “Sponsored: Entertainment” and “Sponsored: More ways to enjoy your TV,” as well as a “Rent or buy” row. It’s a lot.

On initial setup, all featured content autoplays with audio. If you do buy the Omni Mini-LED TV, make sure the first thing you do is go into the full settings menu and disable autoplay. Look for the gear icon on the home screen to display a bunch of tiles for different menu options (you’ll see it at the right end of the row of installed apps). You cannot access these tiles from the gear icon on the remote, only the gear icon on the home screen. From there, go to Preferences, then Featured Content, then make sure both Allow Video Autoplay and Allow Audio Autoplay are set to Off. While you’re there, I’d recommend double-checking your Privacy Settings and Data Usage Monitoring settings.

The OS itself is zippy and responsive. Scrolling through the different rows of recommendations or installed apps has no delay from button press to movement on screen, and apps load up immediately. I did run into some problems with app sign-ins, though. One — the Les Mills workout app — would put me through a sign-in loop and never actually get loaded properly. Sometimes when opening apps I’d find that I would need to sign in again (this happened multiple times across multiple apps). The Hulu app also randomly quit while watching Interior Chinatown while the remote was sitting feet away from me on the coffee table. The inconsistency of functionality was beyond frustrating.

In order to avoid all of those annoyances, I’d recommended following Caleb’s suggestion in his Panasonic Z95A review (which also runs on the Amazon Fire TV OS). Get a separate streaming device — your choice of Apple TV, Google TV Streamer, or a Roku Ultra — plug it into one of the HDMI ports, go into the Settings section as before (through the gear icon on the home screen), select Display and Sounds, then Power Controls, and switch Power On from Home to Last Input. That’ll cause the TV to start up on whichever input you were using when you turned off the TV.

There’s no question that the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED is the best TV that Amazon has produced so far. Over previous iterations, brightness has been boosted, accuracy out of the box has improved, and blooming control has gotten significantly better. Compared with other TVs in its price range, though, the Omni Mini-LED is still trying to catch up to the pack. Both the Hisense U8N and TCL QM8 are significantly brighter than the Omni Mini-LED (both achieve more than double the brightness), have more dimming zones, and their grayscale and color accuracy are a bit better. Yes, they’re both a couple hundred dollars more for the 65-inch model, but they also both have Google TV OS instead of Amazon Fire TV OS, and I’d say the extra money is worth it.

That is, of course, unless you’re looking for a TV that fits easily into your Amazon Alexa ecosystem. For that use case, the Omni Mini-LED will serve its purpose well. You’ll get easy integration and a pretty good picture. If you’re a fan of Amazon Fire TV OS, this TV is worth your consideration.