Amazon Fire TV 75″ Omni Series 4K UHD smart TV with Dolby Vision, hands-free with Alexa

2 reviews for Amazon Fire TV 75″ Omni Series 4K UHD smart TV with Dolby Vision, hands-free with Alexa

1. 

   Rated 4 out of 5

   Billy – December 7, 2022

   
   The TV is replacing my 15 year old 52″ that still works but just doesn’t have that good of a picture anymore. I read ALL of the reviews on here and was a little sketched out by how many issues some people were having. I decided to pull the trigger, especially for the $700 price point, and thought if it is junk then I’ll return it and go with something else. Although I have only had this thing for a couple days now, I am extremely impressed by the picture and the OS! I used an Amazon Fire TV Stick before with my old TV and as soon as I turned on the new TV, it loaded updates and then asked me if I wanted to transfer the files from my old Firestick to the new Fire TV. It then proceeded to bring all the apps over and saved me a lot of time dealing with this manually. I also paired it with an Echo Studio… this went seamlessly. I can’t speak for the audio of the TV alone, but when paired with the Echo Studio it is outstanding! I am hoping to add a second Echo Studio and a sub very soon! I also subscribe to YouTube TV and after getting the TV set up and running I upgraded to the YouTube TV 4k trial and that is where you really see what this TV is capable of as far as picture quality! I was not really impressed with how some older shows looked… my wife used the term “soap opera looking” and I think that is pretty spot on. I messed with the settings some but didn’t really find a good “fix”. I will continue to adjust and will update if I get that ironed out. One other thing is I noticed in some of the reviews people were complaining about losing the remote and not having a way to turn on the TV other than via Alexa. This TV actually does come with a power button next to the Alexa mic on/off switch.Overall I am very pleased with the TV. The 4 stars were due to the shipping fiasco. Look, I understand this time of year (between Thanksgiving and Christmas) is a hectic time for shipping items. When I ordered the TV it said the shipping would be in like 2-3 weeks… I was ok with that. But, the 3rd party that Amazon used was terrible. When I would check the tracking update, their website didn’t recognize the tracking number. Then I get an notification that the delivery must be scheduled so that an adult is there to sign for it upon arrival. That’s fine, but they didn’t call and schedule this until the day before delivery to my house. Since the tracking was so jacked up, I had very little time to arrange someone to be at my house between the 4 hour window they gave me! I was able to get someone there for the first couple of hours before I was able to take time off from work to relieve them. I sat there waiting through the entire delivery window and beyond. Finally, 2 hours after the end of the scheduled time they arrive in a smaller box truck. I lost a 1/2 day of work for nothing.The TV itself is great so far and I will update as I get more use from it, but if you are looking for a less expensive 75″ tv… this one is good choice.UPDATE 12/12/2022: After playing around with the settings I have been able to get rid of the “soap opera look”. Using the preset video settings, I was using the “Standard” movie setting. After changing that to “Natural” setting, it now looks more like a movie theater vs soap opera. I have also noticed that the dark/black scenes are not showing grit or grainy video like many mentioned in the reviews. In fact, it is a very solid black that I see and perhaps the grainy complaints are due to the source rather than the tv?The longer I’ve had this tv the more I am VERY pleased with it! It would be nice it if it were a 120Hz vs 60Hz since I do love to watch football and it does pixelate some… but the overall experience has been completely positive for me. I would absolutely recommend this tv to anyone!One last thing, I mounted the tv on my wall using a wall mount that was rated for 110lbs. The tv is said to be approximately 65lbs. The mount I used is an articulating mount for putting the tv in the corner of a room and having ability to pull it out and position it left/right. Although I had plenty of “room” left in the weight column, it does not let me sleep well at night worrying about waking to see my tv on the floor! I would suggest getting a mount rated for at least 150lbs if using the articulating type.UPDATE 12/19/2022: As I mentioned above, I have paired my fire tv with an Echo Studio speaker and it sounds outstanding! However, I had an issue with this pairing that I wanted to mention here in case anyone else has had this problem. When I turned on my tv the other morning it would not load up saying that there was no internet connection. After some quick troubleshooting I verified that the internet was working fine on another tv with a firestick in my house. So I tried to do a “restart” of the fire tv application but that didn’t help. I then decided to try to do a hard reboot by disconnecting the power to the tv and speaker. This didn’t work either. In fact, at this point my tv and the speaker were no longer paired (although it said they were in the alexa app on my phone). The speaker attempted to complete its “setup” after the power was turned back on, but couldn’t complete it. It actually got into a loop of “Attempting to connect to internet… preparing device… etc.” So I unplugged the speaker from power and tried to get my tv to work. After doing another reboot on the tv, it came up and was working fine. Once I applied power again to my speaker… my tv started dropping out again and finally lost internet connection. Bottom line is, the speaker was somehow interfering with the tv so I performed a factory reset on the speaker and went and cleared the pairing out of the alexa app on my phone and let everything do it setup again and I re-paired the tv and the speaker and it all is working happy again. I’ve seen some reviews mention the speaker and tv would lose their pairing so I hope this might help someone else. Still happy with both, but if this gets to be a regular occurrence… I will likely change my mind.UPDATE 21DEC2022: The TV will not work with the Echo Studio via Dolby ATMOS… at least mine don’t. After over an hour on the phone with tech support, the person on the other end told me this after we had tried to factory reset the ECHO Studio and the Fire TV. Hopefully a future OS update will make this work. I suppose it will still work using the fiber optic connection.FINAL UPDATE 06JAN2022: I actually found out what was causing the Echo Studio speakers to stop working with the Fire TV. After no real help through customer support and actually had a refund scheduled, I dug into the forums and finally found the answer. The Alexa app does not play nice with a VPN. I disabled the VPN and the system has been working flawlessly for 2 weeks. I hope they are able to sort this out with future software updates because I do want to use a VPN if possible. I’m very happy, NOW, with this TV and speaker system!

2. 

   Rated 4 out of 5

   Keith Phillips – April 17, 2022

   
   I have a significant investment in Amazon Fire TV Cubes (3) and Sticks (6) and so I decided to try out the Amazon Fire TV (43 Inch Omni). This is for my master bedroom and is not my main viewing TV. I also own an LG 55 inch C6 (OLED), a 65 inch LG 9000 (IPS panel) and a 55 inch Hisense U8G (VA panel) which are fairly high end TV’s that all have above average picture quality and upscale functionality.The Omni TV does not compare to my main TV’s in picture quality, however, the 4K picture is actually quite decent for a bedroom TV whose main viewing time is either early morning or late evening (in a darkened room). Also, we don’t have any soundbars, DVD players, or Cable boxes attached to the Omni TV. We use YouTube TV for local channels and have a number of streaming services (Prime Video, Netflix, Hulu, etc.).What I like about the Omni TV1. Very lightweight at 15.5 pounds making it easy to mount on the wall.2. Set up was extremely easy since I am a registered Amazon customer. Plug it in, answer a few questions the TV does a software update, linked to my saved settings for WiFi, automatically downloaded my previous applications from my Fire TV Stick and it was ready to go.3. The interface is exactly like all my other Fire TV Sticks and Cubes, there was no learning curve. The interface is zippy and functions well. After loading 30+ applications I still had 6 GB of memory unused, which is great. I was also able to jailbreak the TV (like the Fire TV Stick) and download Kodi, Cinema HD, Downloader, IP Vanish, and several other 3rd party utilities, with no problem. All applications work great.4. Based on the integrated voice and Fire TV capability, you don’t need to spend $50 on a FireTV Max or $100 on a Fire TV Cube and a $30 Echo Dot, making the TV an even greater value.5. The Bluetooth remote is a nice design and easy to use. A bit of an enhancement over the base Fire TV stick remote with some controls unique to the Omni TV (like settings, channel selector, prior key, live TV key)6. The integrated voice commands worked for the most part. Actually, this is pretty cool and should only get better over time. I do have one issue where Voice Commands such as “Turn on the TV” work just fine, but “Turn Off the TV” does not work. This is a minor issue and hopefully will get fixed with future software updates. Note: Amazon customer service could not find a resolution to this problem other than resetting my TV and wiping out all my downloaded applications/passwords. I elected to live with the problem. All other commands seem to work well.7. The 4K picture quality is acceptable in the bedroom.8. The price is excellent. At $300 for the 43-inch TV, it was priced appropriately for the functionality.9. Once you get used to how to tweak the picture using the Picture Mode function (Standard, Movie, Dynamic, Custom) settings you can improve the quality of the picture a bit. For me, the Movie mode, with Picture Temp set to Warm 1 worked best for me. Compared to other TV’s the number of adjustments are very limited. However, for ease of use for most users, this is probably acceptable. I do like using voice commands to “Switch Picture Mode to Standard, Movie, Dynamic, etc.”. This saves clicking the remote button multiple times and is easier to execute.10. Integration to my Ring Doorbell and 4 cameras around my property works great. The Omni TV supports either full screen as well as Picture in Picture and is voice-activated. “Show me the Front Yard Camera” is all that is needed to bring up the picture….very easy to do.11. All my TP-Link KASA smart plugs can be activated via voice through the Omni TV, i.e. “Turn on the bedroom lights”., “Turn off my backyard landscape lights”, etc.12. Drop-in works across other Echo Dots.13. The Omni TV can participate in standard “Speaker Groups”. i.e. “Play music Upstairs” works.14. You can control attached Sound Bars, DVD players, and Cable boxes with this TV (like the Fire TV Cube). With 4HDMI ports, you have a lot of expansion capabilities. It comes with an IR blaster that can be used for non-bluetooth devices.15. You can attach up to two Echo Dots to this TV to improve the sound quality. In my opinion, the sound quality on this set is ok for a bedroom. Not great, but not bad either. After all, it is a bedroom!!16. The 43 inch size is perfect for a bedroom TV. Bumping up to a 50 or 55 inch TV would have been too big for my space. Not all TV manufacturers offer this size.What I don’t like about the Fire TV1. The lack of Dolby Vision and HDR 10+ limits the 4K picture quality. Dolby Vision should have been included in all the TV’s and not just the 65 and 75 inch models.2. The backlighting is very basic with direct-lit. I would have paid more to get Full Array backlighting to enhance picture quality.3. Good HDR requires much higher NITs – I.e. brightness (like 500 to 600) to be truly effective. The Omni TV seems to top out around 325, which is not enough to make HDR details pop in a dark scene.4. The VA Panel has poor side viewing angles (most all vendors have this problem) but in my bedroom, this was not a problem.All in all, I would recommend this TV if you want a decent 4K picture for a bedroom, want to save some bucks, and are invested in the Amazon echo system. The price is great for what you get and you don’t need to purchase a Fire TV and Echo Dot to gain voice control with another TV brand.For the main viewing area, I would pay more for a larger higher quality TV that supports Dolby Vision, Full Array backlighting, better-upscaling processor, and higher HDR peak brightness.UPDATE 5/2/22 FIX for TV not shutting down by voice commandI was able to solve the voice problem of why the Omni TV’s Alexa would “Turn on the TV” but fail to “Turn off the TV” (it would always go back to the home screen and never shut down). The solution was to go into the Alexa App on my Phone – Select Devices, then – Select All Devices – Find my Omni TV in the device list – Select the Omni TV then TURN OFF Two items 1) Adaptive Listening and 2) Follow up Mode. The minute I made these two changes the TV will now turn off using my voice. Many of my Echo Dots have these features turned on so I made the assumption that the Omni TV would work the same way since these features are available. That was a wrong assumption. My guess is when you have the Follow Up mode turned on, during the shut down process, Alexa gets confused and is waiting for a follow up command (so it does not shut down). In my opinion this is a software bug. I am surprised that Amazon support does not have this easy fix in their knowledge base. If you have this problem, try my fix.