Amazon Ember Artline 2026  TV Review

The Amazon Ember Artline has just alright peak brightness in HDR. While most content is bright overall, small details don't stand out at all, and most real scenes look flat and dull. There's no variation in brightness with different content, though, which is great.

Switching to Game Mode has no noticeable impact on brightness in HDR. Colors are slightly more saturated overall, despite using the same picture settings in both modes.

The SDR peak brightness on this TV is good. It's bright enough to overcome glare in a moderately lit room, but it's not a good choice for an overly bright room.

Unfortunately, this TV has poor contrast. The native contrast of the panel is good, so most content looks okay, but since there's no local dimming feature, dark scenes are washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so there's no haloing around bright objects or subtitles during dark scenes, but the entire screen is washed out.

This TV doesn't have a local dimming feature, so it can't adjust the backlight of individual zones to brighten up highlights without impacting the rest of the image. This means that there's no distracting flicker or brightness changes as bright highlights move between dimming zones.

Switching to Game Mode doesn't result in any noticeable difference in dark scene performance.

The black uniformity is just okay. There's some noticeable flashlighting around the four corners of the screen, which can be distracting in a dark room. There's no local dimming feature to improve it.

The SDR color volume is good. It has great coverage of the DCI-P3 color space, with very little variation in color saturation with lighter scenes. Coverage of the wider BT.2020 color space isn't quite as good, though, and it struggles a bit more with very light scenes, so some colors look a bit washed out.

The color volume in HDR is good. Most colors are bright and vibrant, but very bright scenes are a bit washed out. It can't display deep saturated colors in dark scenes well due to its low contrast, though.

The Amazon Ember Artline has mediocre accuracy before calibration. The white balance is noticeably off, with way too much red in most shades, which contributes to its warm color temperature. Color accuracy is much better, though, as saturated colors are displayed well, but off-whites are slightly inaccurate. Gamma tracking is very good overall, but slightly high, so most scenes are just a touch darker than they should be.

The accuracy after calibration is fantastic. It's a fairly easy TV to calibrate, but the settings don't allow for an overly aggressive calibration, so it's a bit limiting. There are no significant issues after calibration, but very bright scenes are noticeably darker than they should be.

See our full calibration settings.

The Amazon Ember Artline has decent accuracy in HDR before calibration. The white balance and color accuracy are both decent, with just a few minor issues across the board. There are noticeable color mapping errors, especially saturated shades of red, and luminance mapping is a bit off on everything. The overall color temperature is noticeably warm, and brighter shades of gray have too much red in them.

The TV has great accuracy in HDR after a full calibration. Color accuracy didn't improve much, but the color temperature improved significantly, and the red tone in brighter shades is gone. The white balance improved significantly in brighter shades, but shadow details are still off.

The PQ EOTF tracking on this TV is just okay. It tracks most midtones extremely well, but can't display shadow details properly due to its low contrast. Near-blacks are raised, and darker details are a bit crushed. All content cuts off sharply at the TV's peak brightness, which limits gradation in bright areas.

The low-quality content smoothing on this TV is sub-par. It preserves details extremely well, but it just doesn't do much to reduce macro blocking and pixelization. This is mainly noticeable in low-quality streams like most streaming services or cable TV channels.

Unfortunately, the upscaling on this TV is bad. Fine details are very soft and hard to make out.

The gradient handling on this TV is sub-par. There's severe banding in all dark shades and in brighter shades of green and blue.

The input lag on this TV is mediocre. It's a bit higher than most other TVs on the market, and while it's low enough for casual gaming or turn-based games, PC users and FPS players will likely find it to be a bit sluggish.

There are a few different ways to enable this TV's low-latency mode. On HDMI 1, you can enable the Gaming HDMI option, which gives you the lowest latency but also enables VRR. On the other ports, you can enable Game Mode, which delivers the same input lag but doesn't support VRR, as VRR only works on port 1.

Although there's a setting for chroma 4:4:4 support, it doesn't actually work, and 4:4:4 isn't displayed properly in any mode. This results in blurry text when used with a PC but doesn't impact picture clarity when gaming on a console.

This TV supports VRR, but only on HDMI 1. There's a separate VRR toggle on the other inputs, but it doesn't actually work, and external devices don't detect the TV as VRR compatible. The VRR feature isn't very effective, anyway, as it has a very narrow range, so it can't take advantage of Low Framerate Compensation. The frame timing is also very inconsistent, even when you're within the operating range of VRR, so it looks better with VRR disabled entirely.

Unfortunately, the Amazon Ember Artline has a bad CAD at the max refresh rate of 60Hz. Motion is incredibly blurry in most scenes. There's no overshoot, but pixels are extremely slow to even transition part way to the next shade.

The Amazon Ember Artline doesn't support a 120Hz refresh rate.

These results are the same as the max refresh rate, as this TV is limited to a 60Hz refresh rate.

This TV can't take full advantage of the PS5 or PS5 Pro. It doesn't support any 120Hz inputs, so you're limited to 60Hz.

This TV can't take full advantage of the PS5 or PS5 Pro. It doesn't support any 120Hz inputs, so you're limited to 60Hz. It supports Dolby Vision gaming, though.

Thanks to its slow response time, there's relatively little stutter on this TV when watching content. You might still notice it in very slow panning shots, but it's minor.

Unfortunately, the motion interpolation feature is ineffective at reducing stutter. While it reduces the average amount of time that each frame is held on the screen, since the TV can't remove judder the frame pacing is noticeably uneven.

This TV is incapable of removing judder from any 24p content, regardless of the source type or settings used on the TV. This is extremely uncommon, as the TV should technically be able to adjust its refresh rate to remove 24p stutter, but it just doesn't work. This results in a noticeably uneven frame pacing.

There's no micro judder.

This TV has a terrible response time when watching content. All transitions are incredibly slow, which helps reduce stutter but results in very blurry motion overall.

Unfortunately, the response time is uneven, resulting in very noticeable color artifacts in fast transitions.

This TV uses pulse-width modulation (PWM) to adjust the backlight intensity. It uses true PWM, with a shorter duty cycle as you lower the backlight setting, and no flicker at max brightness. The PWM frequency is fairly low, which may cause headaches and discomfort in people sensitive to it.

There's no optional backlight strobing feature on this TV, also known as black frame insertion.

The matte anti-reflective coating on the Amazon Ember Artline does a great job reducing the intensity of direct, mirror-like reflections. Windows and lights directly opposite the screen are barely noticeable.

Unfortunately, the screen coating causes black levels to rise noticeably during the day, so dark scenes look even more washed out.

The matte coating reduces direct reflections, but works by spreading them out across the screen, so the total amount of reflected light is mediocre. There are no unwanted diffraction artifacts like rainbow smear, though.

This TV has decent color saturation in a bright room. Ambient light has a noticeable impact on color saturation, especially for very bright colors.

The Amazon Ember Artline has a mediocre viewing angle. The brightness of the screen fades noticeably as you move to the sides, and at a wide angle, it becomes very noticeably washed out. This makes it less suitable for a wide seating arrangement.

The gray uniformity of this TV is sub-par. While there's not too much dirty screen effect in the center, the rest of the screen is considerably darker, which is noticeable in any content.

The TV uses an RGB subpixel layout. It appears to use true quantum dots, as there's a very strong separation of colors, with precise, narrow peaks.

The inputs are a bit dated, as all four HDMI ports are limited to HDMI 2.0 bandwidth, and there's no ATSC 3.0 tuner for 4k over-the-air broadcasts.

The TV supports eARC, which allows it to pass uncompressed high-quality audio from a connected source to your home theater system or soundbar. Unfortunately, it has extremely limited format support, and it can only pass through two channels of LPCM audio. The formats it supports work fine for watching shows on the native apps, but external devices like game consoles and Blu-ray players should be connected directly to your audio system instead.

The Amazon Ember Artline has a very typical design for an art gallery TV. It comes with a mounting kit instead of a stand; the ones shown here are third-party feet that mount to the VESA brackets. The bezels are thicker than usual on all four sides, but are uniform, and they can be customized to match your decor, with different colors and finishes available at the time of purchase.

This TV doesn't come with a stand. The feet shown are a third-party stand that we purchased separately for testing.

The inputs are housed in a recessed box on the right side of the TV (when facing the front). This makes them very difficult to access, but it helps keep the TV flush to the wall when mounted. There are grooves on the back to help route cables out to the bottom of the TV for a clean setup.

This TV has good build quality. There are no obvious issues with its construction. The bezels clip on magnetically, and feel nice and solid when installed.

This TV runs the Fire TV smart interface, which is modern and has a decent selection of streaming apps. The apps work fairly well, but the interface freezes at times, and there are some bugs, like the VRR feature not working properly and the 4:4:4 setting not actually displaying 4:4:4 properly.

The ambient art experience can be customized to display artwork or your own pictures automatically, and it uses motion detection to turn off when there's nobody in the room. Unfortunately, the minimum brightness in the art mode is only 125 nits, which is very high for use in a dark room.

Like all TVs on the market, there are ads throughout the interface, and they can't be fully disabled.

• Remote
• Batteries
• Mounting kit
• Bezels (you can choose which one you want at the time of purchase)
• Manuals

This TV was originally tested with firmware version 8.1.7.6 (RS8176/4060).

The Amazon Ember Artline has a sub-par frequency response. While it gets very loud, it struggles to deliver clear dialogue, with a noticeable low-treble dip that causes dialogue to sound somewhat recessed and less detailed.