I tested Amazon's fancy new Fire TV Omni Mini-LED: this one feature makes it fantastic for movie nights

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED quick review

If you’re browsing on Amazon to buy a brand-new TV, then you’ll probably be considering sets made by the retailer alongside rivals from TCL, Samsung and Hisense, and in particular wondering if they’re any good.

The Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED is the new top-end range of TVs from Amazon, succeeding its Omni QLED series from 2023, and while it has a range of upgrades, the big new selling point is at the end of the name.

Mini-LED is a fancy kind of screen technology that uses smaller individual lights than other sets to backlight your picture, which has a range of benefits including improved contrast (the difference between neighboring colors) and darker-looking blacks. More and more TVs around the world are coming out with mini-LED tech but they still cost a lot right now.

I hosted a few movie nights while testing the Fire TV and the contrast alone makes watching films really immersive. Like when you're sitting in a dark cinema you can really feel the strength of the bright areas and the gloominess of the dark ones and I particularly appreciated how night-time scenes were a lot easier to see.

This display feature is why the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED TV is one you might want to consider: it’s not cheap by any means, but it undercuts a lot of rivals on the market. Plus it does so while bringing lots of extra features to improve your entertainment.

For example it has a 144Hz display, so it’s great for video gamers. It allows for hands-free navigation to perform basic tasks, something I used all the time when I couldn’t find the remote. And it has many screen technologies so that movies and TV shows look really great. For the price, I was really impressed with how the display looked.

I had two small gripes which got in the way of my experience, however both were about using the TV rather than watching things. Firstly, the remote wasn’t very responsive, and sometimes I’d need to wait for my input to register or press a button again to scroll or select – the remote also misses a few buttons that I’d have liked to see.

Secondly, the TV runs on Amazon’s operating system (OS) called Fire TV, and as many users online seem to agree, it’s not the most aesthetically-pleasing OS. You get inundated with ads, the layout isn’t easy to personalize, and navigating for your chosen app or service can sometimes be counterintuitive.

If you’re the kind of person who spends more time scrolling than actually watching, then these issues might crop up. However I can see some people finding these concerns easy to overlook.

If that’s you, then this is simply a good-looking TV that offers value for money in most departments.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED price information

• 55"/65"/75" and 85" in the US
• Starts at $819.99 / £849.99 for cheapest option
• Can be found in sales easily

In most countries, there are three sizes of TV: 55, 65 and 75 inches. Here’s how they stack up in terms of price:

In the US, there’s also a gigantic 85-inch version of the set. This’ll cost you $2,099.99 to buy and it's not available in the UK.

This constitutes a price increase of a couple of hundred dollars / pounds per size option over the QLED, as well as a removal of the two smallest sizes and the introduction of some larger ones.

It’s worth flagging that almost as soon as the Omni Mini-LEDs were announced, they were put on sale for Black Friday, and at the time of writing several weeks later they’re still discounted (albeit to a lesser degree). So you can probably find a discount if you look around.

These aren’t the cheapest mini-LED 4K TVs at these sizes with the likes of TCL and Hisense offering alternatives that are a touch cheaper, but Amazon has clearly positioned its TVs at the more affordable end of the spectrum.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED set-up

• Legs in box but can be wall-mounted too
• Multiple ports in rear
• Easy to set up

You can mount the Fire TV Omni Mini-LED on a wall or on a stand, and I did the former for my testing. You get legs for it in the box if you prefer the latter.

The TV has ports for optical connection, ethernet, antennae, headphones, an IR emitter and a single USB-A port, as well as four HDMI ports of which one is for eARC. As well as wired internet with the ethernet port you can, of course, use Wi-Fi which I did.

I found setting up the TV very quick: you connect it to the internet and then set it up using your Amazon account. I’ve already set up Fire TV devices so it remembered all my apps and choices, though if you’re new, you will have to go through the extra step of creating an account.

As the Omni Mini-LED TV has Fire TV built in, and is therefore a smart TV, you don’t need to connect anything to it if you don’t want. I used the TV alongside my PlayStation, hence the cable you see in the photo.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED day-to-day use

• Software is cluttered
• Voice navigation is handy
• Ambient Experience is fun to have

The Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED TVs run on the company’s custom-built TV software – this is called Fire TV and it’s also what you get if you use a streaming stick from the company.

It’s hard to deny that Fire TV is a little bit overwhelming to look at. Boot it up and your display is cluttered up with a icons of varying sizes like big TV show and movie picks at the bottom, streaming apps along the middle and huge commercials at the top, some of which auto-play. You don’t know where to look!

This software is good if you don’t know what you want to watch, as you’re inundated with recommendations and adverts, but if you do know which app or service you’re navigating to then it’s quite annoying.

I also found a few bugs in the software, with one in particular rearing its head a few times (including during my photo session, hence why I have it on camera!). On Prime Video's own platform, it didn't let me skip through videos sometimes claiming that I could fast forward through adverts... when I was just watching the movie. But there weren't too many problems overall.

I quickly found myself relying on voice navigation to open apps and movies without having to deal with the interface, as it’s very convenient and (most of the time at least) is pretty accurate to what you asked.

Something to flag in this section is the Fire TV Ambient Experience, which is basically a screensaver for your TV. It takes a bit of work to set it up with widgets and backdrops, and it does miss a level of customization that I would have liked to see, but I did enjoy how it’d turn my idling TV into a nice wintery moodscape with a crackling fire or rushing snowy stream.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED remote

• Takes AAA batteries
• All the expected buttons plus a few
• Lack of 'input' button is annoying

The Amazon Fire TV Alexa Voice Remote comes with the Omni Mini-LED. This has all the options you’d expect from a smart TV remote, plus a few more.

These expected buttons are the likes of volume, channel and home buttons, but there was one that I really missed: an input button. I connected my PlayStation to the TV through a HDMI input, and with no ‘Input’ button on the remote, I had to return to the Fire TV home page every time I wanted to switch from streaming a movie to playing a game. It was only a few extra seconds but it’s an annoying extra step.

The extra options I mention are really handy for navigation. Four buttons at the bottom will take you straight to select streaming services (the options depend on your region), which is handy as long as you use at least one of those platforms. And as mentioned, I used voice control a lot, and the blue Alexa button is what you press and hold to activate that (you can also do it straight to the TV, but I found the remote way was a lot more reliable).

On the topic of reliability, I found that the Fire TV Alexa Remote didn’t always work seamlessly with the TV. Sometimes I’d have to press a button twice to enable it, and my flat isn’t big so that’s not a simple distance issue.

Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED video and audio quality

• 4K screen with 144Hz max refresh rate
• Mini-LED screen tech brings myriad improvements
• Audio is 2.1 with Dolby Atmos

The meat and potatoes of a TV is its audio-visual performance, and the Fire TV Omni Mini-LED packs in lots of technology to make movies and TV shows look really good.

The resolution is 4K, with a pixel count of 3840 x 2160 regardless of which set size you opt for. That means you can watch high-resolution content via Blu-Ray or streaming service if you have access.

The default refresh rate is 120Hz, which is high for a TV, but when you enable gaming mode it goes even higher to 144Hz.

As you may be able to tell from the name, the real draw is the use of Mini-LED screen technology, with this marking Amazon’s debut into this fancy screen tech. The way this works is to back-light the screen picture with loads of small LED lights instead of fewer larger ones like in a normal LED TV.

If that’s too much tech jargon for you, the benefits are these: the contrast is improved, so brighter colors look brighter and darker ones look darker. Plus details can be sharper, which helps alongside the 4K spec, and brighter objects on screen won’t ‘bleed’ and make objects around them look brighter too. They’re not mandatory upgrades by any means, but for people who care about visual fidelity they’re useful benefits.

Helping the TV’s case are several technology standards which do the same including HDR10 certification, Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ Adaptive.

This all makes movies and TV shows look great – it’s like having your own cinema screen in your living room. I enjoyed especially how the contrast improved movie nights, as this can help you appreciate details in shots and the artistic vision between color choices and framing on screen. Before the Fire TV I’d used a cheaper smart TV and the improvements here were drastic.

Another tech which Amazon has introduced here is called Intelligent Picture, which ostensibly uses an AI processor to optimize each picture based on what you’re looking at. It’s hard to judge how effective this is since I couldn’t watch without it on, but it’s worth flagging anyway.

Audio sounds good, with the TV packing a 2.1 audio set-up with two speakers and one subwoofer. Bear in mind that the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar only has 2.0 so if you've been considering a cheap TV and that, or a more expensive set like the Omni Mini-LED, the latter might be better.

Dolby Atmos supported by the set too, which is a kind of surround-sound audio set-up to make movies and shows more immersive.

Is the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED worth buying?

This definitely isn’t a TV for everyone: it’s big, with cutting-edge technology and handy extras. If you’re looking for any old set to buy for your living room, regardless of its visual specs, there are much cheaper options you should be considering (which we’ll get to later).

I’d recommend it for people who are starting to build their home theater system, but don’t want to buy the absolute cream of the crop that the best TV brands offer.

The Fire TV Omni Mini-LED is great value for money, despite a few rough edges, and so it’s best suited for people who are becoming more tech-savvy and want to have some premium features without splurging too much on the best premium TVs on the market.

Competition

Looking for something similar to the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED? These are other options that are either coming from Amazon, or bearing Mini-LED tech. The links below are all for the 55-inch option so you can easily compare prices (except for the TCL C855 which is the 65-inch model, the smallest one).

• Looking for something cheaper? Alongside the Mini-LED sets Amazon announced its Fire TV 4-series of 4K TVs. They're smaller and don't pack as many features or the high-tech screen technology but they're a lot more affordable.
• The Hisense U7N is a similarly-priced range of Mini-LED TVs that run on Google TV (in most regions, or VIDAA in the UK) and have a comparable range of features.
• A year prior Amazon released the Fire TV Omni QLED range of TVs which also look pretty good. While they miss some of the Mini-LED sets' features, like a high refresh rate, they cost a fair amount less.
• The pretty cheap TCL C805 and mid-range TCL 855 are both Mini-LED rivals to the Omni which have impress feature sets. They run Google TV.

More on Amazon Fire TV devices

• How to turn off an Amazon Fire TV Stick
• How to get Netflix on an Amazon Fire TV
• Amazon Fire TV Stick vs Fire TV Stick 4K comparison
• Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus review

How I tested the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED

I used the 55-inch model of the Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED for an entire month, replacing my standard TV in my living room with it. I used it alongside the Fire TV Soundbar Plus, although I stopped using that towards the end so I could appreciate the TV’s audio chops.

Most of that time was spent streaming movies and shows from Netflix, Disney Plus and Prime Video, and also streaming lots of Christmas music from Spotify and Amazon Music, but I also watched some videos on other streaming services and gaming on my PlayStation. The Ambient Experience got lots of time on the screen too.

I’ve been testing various tech products for over 6 years; not just TVs but projectors, streaming sticks, speakers, soundbars, tablets and more. There are very few types of gadget I haven’t tried at this point! This coverage has been for What to watch and various of our sister sites including TechRadar, TechRadar Pro, Creative Bloq and TopTenReviews.