Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsAwful ownership experience, great display after tons of tuning. AVOID AT ALL COSTS.
Reviewed in the United States on November 23, 2022
Summary: image quality is great, but the clunky interface, unavoidable hardware lag, and Amazon bloatware make owning this TV an absolutely abysmal experience. If this is the highest tier of TV Amazon has to offer, look elsewhere even if it costs you a few hundred dollars more.
Details on why you SHOULD NOT buy this TV:
1. THERE ARE INESCAPABLE ADS THAT YOU MUST CLICK THROUGH TO ACCESS CONTENT. This is absolutely unacceptable on a TV that is paid for in full. There are similar features on other Fire devices, like tablets, but that is disclosed to you up front at the time of purchase, and you have the option of paying slightly more to disable them. No such option exists on these TVs, and no disclosure is made at the time of purchase. It’s a joke and an insult to customers. (NOTE: other competitors, like Roku, have ads as well, but the ads don’t need to be clicked through to access content)
2. The user interface is unnecessarily complex, and it can’t get out of its own way. As one small example, you have to select a Fire profile on TV startup, and only then can you access apps, like Netflix, which themselves have profiles you must select. Forcing users to select a profile up front when they will have to again select further app profiles regardless is ridiculous. Let us just get into our apps from the beginning and skip this unnecessary step.. This is just one example of user-unfriendly interface design; it’s endemic and everywhere you go in the Fire TV UI: super tiny apps, apps that take multiple clicks to access even if ads were removed, inability to access picture and sound settings from the main menu, profile and other settings that are completely inaccessible on the TV and must be edited on websites or apps for seemingly-arbitrary reasons, and a slew of others. You simply can’t make this TV do what you want it to do without having to click a million things, and even then, the end result is sometimes hidden away on another device or simply can’t be accessed.
3. Glitchy, rampant hardware lag is EVERYWHERE. The TV takes seconds to respond to single clicks of the remote. Shows start without proper buffering and play in resolution worse than a Super Nintendo while also moving in stop-motion for 10 seconds before actually working. Ad-supported apps bounce between commercials and content incredibly slowly, which would be fine if it were buffering, but it’s not and the first bit of commercial or content is a pixelated, glitchy mess regardless. Trying to fast forward or rewind a show requires a prayer to ancient Incan gods, and only half the time does the TV actually respond to your button press, and only half of the time after that does it actually stop fast forwarding/rewinding when you let go of the button instead of 5 seconds later. Menus boot up super slowly, and once available still don’t respond to your clicks. It’s like this TV has 40 pounds of crap shoved into 5 pounds of hardware, and it just can’t keep up. The worst part is that when the TV confuses itself enough from all the overload, it crashes and restarts…multiple times per day. (NOTE: TV is completely up to date, and it’s connected to Amazon’s own 6th-gen eero mesh network, which is excellent; all hardware acceleration is also turned off since it makes content look terrible anyway)
4. Bloatware. Bloatware everywhere. The TV comes with about as much unwanted software on it as a 2003 Dell PC. Unlike the 20-year-old Dell, however, this bloatware can’t be removed. You can hide it from certain menus, but it will always be there, always try to send you notifications, and always try to force its way into your periphery. Even Apple figured this out a decade ago with its native apps: let us delete unwanted junk that we don’t need. Maybe the TV would actually work if we could get rid of all this garbage?
5. WHY DOES ALEXA HOME THEATER MAKE A LOUD, OBNOXIOUS “BOOP” NOISE EVERY TIME YOU CHANGE THE VOLUME!? And how in the world do we disable that freaking noise so we don’t wake up napping children when we want to turn the volume down from 5/100 to 3/100? It’s not in the options of the TV, I can tell you that, which further reinforces how clunky and unintuitive this entire UI experience is if this option is hidden in some other app completely unrelated to Fire TV.
6. Every possible hardware modification of the TV’s content is turned on from the start, meaning everything you watch looks like a super saturated daytime soap opera. It’s 2022, guys. Stop shipping TVs with Motion Smoothing and 17 other things turned on by default. No one likes them.
If for some masochistic reason you still want this TV after the above points, here is the singular reason you SHOULD buy this TV:
1. Once all the hardware acceleration bloat is turned off, and after you’ve edited the picture settings (which again, cannot be accessed through the main menu) so that the image quality doesn’t look like the Teletubbies, the image quality is excellent. Colors are uniform, pictures are crisp (when they aren’t pixelated from all the lag), details are clear, dark areas are dark without looking grey, etc. It’s likely that the display is manufactured by Samsung (like most QLED displays), which is great, and it shows.
Overall, there is no way I can recommend this TV to anyone who wants to retain their sanity. It’s very clear that Amazon chose to compromise TV functionality and the user experience so that it could push Alexa, a metric short-ton of Amazon services, and ads, and it does all of this by bait and switching you with an excellent display at an excellent price-point. It’s a borderline scam since the ads, bloatware, overloaded hardware, and unusable interfaces aren’t made apparent to you up front. The price looks great compared to its competitors, but there’s a reason for that, and the reason isn’t made clear at the time of purchase. It’s an unforgivable business strategy, and I’ll be returning this TV in 5 days once Thanksgiving has passed.
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
