About a week ago, the rumour mill churned out some reports about Amazon’s plans to launch some televisions. Well, it looks like those reports were true, and Amazon has announced its own range of TVs — the high-end Fire TV Omni Series and the more affordable 4-Series Fire TV.
Amazon’s TVs on Fire
Both of the ranges come in 43in, 50in and 55in, while the Fire TV Omni is also available in 65in and 75in sizes. All of them come in black, while the larger Fire TV Omni devices also come in silver. All of ‘em feature 4K HDR10 compatibility and Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) technology. On to the sound — each offers Dolby Digital Plus with a passthrough of Dolby-encoded audio.
We expected to see Alexa capability in the TVs, and it’s kind of true. All the TVs feature Alexa functionality, but only the higher-end Omni series offers hands-free support, while the 4-Series only has push-to-talk input for Alexa. That seems to be the only notable difference between the higher-end and lower-end, barring the larger sizes.
Speaking of which, those 65in and 75in metallic silver Omnis also feature Dolby Vision display technology — which has been proven to be the best standard for high-end TVs as of late.
Omni and the 4-Series
Also present is a bunch of smart functions and access to the Amazon AppStore — this is where you’ll find all the Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime video goodness. All the TVs come standard with three HDMI 2.0 inputs and one HDMI 2.1 with eARC support, an ethernet and USB port and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity.
We have no idea whether Amazon’s display kit will make it to South Africa, but right now it seems highly unlikely. American companies have historically been reluctant to launch hardware here (ahem… Google), but they’re more than happy to host servers and networking infrastructure here.
International pricing seems good though, considering the 4-Series Fire TV starts at $370 (R5,225 at the time of writing) for 43in. The 43in Fire TV Omni Series is priced at $410 (R5,790 at the time of writing).
Source: ArsTechnica
