Roku Pro Series 2024  TV Review

The Roku 65R8B5 has a unique design, giving off an industrial-style look. The TV is almost entirely made of plastic, including the feet, but its borders are made of metal. It gives the TV thicker bezels than on most modern TVs, but overall, it feels sturdy and looks good.

The TV's feet are basic; they don't feel very sturdy, and the TV wobbles easily when pushed, although it settles quickly. They're wide-set, so you'll need a wide TV table if you're not planning on wall-mounting it. The feet use rotating knobs to tighten up once attached to the TV, so they don't require any tools for assembly.

Footprint of the 65-inch stand: 44.8" x 14.3". The feet raise the screen about 2.4 inches above the table, which is a tight fit for many soundbars, so plan your setup accordingly.

The back of the Roku 65R8B5 is entirely made of sturdy plastic with a unique, hefty industrial look. It's completely flat, so it will sit flush against the wall if you device to have it wall-mounted. It has the standard VESA mounting points on the back. There's also a slot at the top for Roku's Pro Series TV Wall Mount Kit (sold separately), which is hinged, so it lets you pull the TV away from the wall for easy access to the inputs.

Otherwise, the inputs, which are on the right-hand side while looking at the TV from the front, are hard to access when the TV is flush against the wall as they are recessed into the back panel. The TV has velcro straps on the back to help funnel the cables from the inputs towards the bottom, to help with cable management.

The Roku 65R8B5 has good build quality. Even though it noticeably wobbles front to back when pushed, the TV itself is made of sturdy plastic and has a unique style choice with metal borders and an industrial look. There's a bit of flex on the back panel around the inputs and towards the middle of the panel, but this is common and won't cause any issues.

The Roku Pro Series TV has fantastic contrast with local dimming enabled, so dark scenes are displayed very well, even with bright highlights on the screen.

There's some noticeable blooming around bright highlights, but it's great overall. It's especially noticeable around subtitles or bright lights in fairly dark scenes.

The Roku Pro Series 2024 has adequate lighting zone transitions. Unfortunately, the leading edge of bright moving objects is visibly dimmer, and fast-moving small objects are very dim.

There's no difference in dark scene behavior between the calibrated picture modes and when the TV is set in Game Mode.

The Roku Pro Series has excellent HDR brightness, so highlights really stand out during darker scenes. Combined with its fantastic contrast, this TV provides an impactful HDR viewing experience.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Dark HDR
• TV Brightness: Brighter
• Backlight: 100
• Contrast: 50
• Local Dimming: High
• Game Mode: Off
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off
• Color Temperature: Warm

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

• Hallway Lights: 849 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 321 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 430 cd/m²

The Roku Pro Series's HDR brightness is about the same in Game Mode, so the TV's highlights look equally as excellent as they do outside of it.

These measurements are after calibrating the HDR white point with the following settings:

• HDR Picture Mode: Dark HDR
• TV Brightness: Brighter
• Backlight: 100
• Contrast: 50
• Local Dimming: High
• Game Mode: On
• Dynamic Tone Mapping: Off
• Color Temperature: Warm

Results with Dynamic Tone Mapping set to 'On':

• Hallway Lights: 847 cd/m²
• Yellow Skyscraper: 313 cd/m²
• Landscape Pool: 421 cd/m²

The TV's PQ EOTF tracking is decent. Still, near-blacks are raised, shadows are too dark, and the rest of the TV's midtones and bright highlights are overbrightened. Unlike on the Roku Plus Series QLED, enabling Dynamic Tone Mapping on this model leads to excessive brightening, as you can see here. The TV has a sharp roll-off near its peak brightness to preserve bright detail in content mastered at 4000 nits. The TV is bright enough to properly display highlights in content mastered at 600 and 1000 nits, so the roll-off isn't necessary with those.

The Roku Pro Series has amazing SDR brightness, easily overcoming glare in very bright rooms.

These measurements are after calibration with the following settings:

• Picture Mode: Movie
• TV Brightness: Brighter
• Backlight: 100
• Contrast: 50
• Local Dimming: High
• Color Temperature: Warm
• Gamma correction: 2.2 (recommended)

The TV has an excellent color gamut, displaying a wide range of colors with HDR content. It has fantastic coverage of the commonly used DCI-P3 color space. The TV has good coverage of the wider, but not as common, Rec. 2020 color space, although here greens, cyans, and yellows are somewhat inaccurate, as well as being undersaturated.

The TV has great color volume. Dark saturated colors are displayed well due to the TV's fantastic contrast, and it displays a wide range of colors at high luminance levels.

The TV has disappointing pre-calibration accuracy. Its white balance is terrible, with significant accuracy errors throughout every range of gray except blacks. The TV's gamma is far too dark in relation to the reference target of 2.2. The TV's color accuracy is decent; undersaturated colors show a lot of accuracy errors, but the errors go down as the colors get more saturated. The TV's color temperature leans too warm, giving everything a reddish tint.

The Roku Pro Series 2024 is easy to calibrate. Everything works as expected, without any settings 'sticking' or misbehaving.

You can see the full calibration settings we used here.

The TV has good gray uniformity, especially with brighter scenes of uniform color, although the sides of the screen are darker than the center, and there's some visible banding. The TV's uniformity is inadequate in darker (but not black) scenes; there's very noticeable banding across the screen, and the sides are noticeably lighter than the center.

The Roku Pro Series TV's black uniformity is absolutely fantastic. Even with local dimming fully disabled, there's very little blooming in dark scenes, although the entire screen takes on a slight blue-ish tint, with minor uniformity issues throughout. With local dimming enabled, the TV's black uniformity is nearly perfect, with barely any blooming around bright elements of the screen.

The TV has an inadequate viewing angle. The image fades and looks washed out as you move even slightly off-center. This makes it a poor choice for a wide seating arrangement, as anyone sitting off-center sees a degraded image.

The reflection handling on the Roku Pro Series 2024 is just decent. It uses a semi-gloss screen finish, so direct reflections are spread out a bit more across the screen than on TVs with glossy coatings. It does reflect a fair amount of direct reflections, so it performs best without bright lights or windows directly across it; stick to ambient light sources instead, as the TV handles those very well.

The Roku Pro Series 2024 has satisfactory HDR gradient handling. There's extremely noticeable banding in dark grays, however. Dark reds and greens also have noticeable banding, but all other colors have minimal or no banding.

Unfortunately, this TV's processing with low-quality content is poor. It just doesn't smooth out macro-blocking and pixelization well; in fact, it doesn't seem to be doing any smoothing whatsoever, although that means that it preserves details very well.

The Roku Pro Series 2024 has disappointing upscaling capabilities; upscaled content is muddy and hard to make out.

Sharpness processing was calibrated for low-resolution or low-bitrate content, with no over-sharpening, with the following setting:

• Sharpness: 60

If you want a TV with better upscaling capabilities, check out the Hisense 75U8N.

The TV uses a BGR (blue-green-red) subpixel layout. For multimedia usage, this doesn't cause any issues, but it causes text clarity issues when you use this TV as a PC monitor. There are easy workarounds for these issues, however, and you can read about them here.

The Roku Pro Series has a great response time, so motion is fluid and smooth, with just a bit of blur behind fast-moving objects. The TV is noticeably slower when coming out of a dark state, so there's some black smear in shadow details and noticeable overshoot.

The TV flickers at 480Hz in every picture mode below max brightness, which is low enough to be noticeable by those who are sensitive to flicker. At max brightness, the TV is flicker-free.

The Roku Pro supports backlight strobing, commonly known as black frame insertion (BFI). The feature is designed to improve the appearance of motion by strobing its backlight and reducing the amount of persistence blur. Unfortunately, it can only insert black frames at a 120Hz refresh rate and cannot be used while the TV is in Game Mode.

The TV has an optional motion interpolation feature to interpolate content up to 120 fps. Like most motion interpolation features, it works well with slower content, like slow panning shots, but struggles with fast action, leading to artifacting. Motion interpolation can't be activated while the TV is in PC or Game Mode.

The TV's decent response time results in an overall adequate stutter performance. There's some noticeable stutter in slow-panning shots in 24p content, like movies. The TV's stutter performance is exceptional, with 60 fps content.

The TV automatically removes judder from all sources when watching movies or shows that are in 24p, even if they're in a 60Hz signal, like from a cable box.

The Roku Pro supports variable refresh rate technology to reduce screen tearing. VRR works well across the entire refresh range with NVIDIA cards, but with AMD cards, the VRR minimum is 48Hz, as Low-Frame-Compensation (LFC) doesn't activate properly below that as it does on NVIDIA cards.

This TV has incredibly low input lag, ensuring a responsive gaming and desktop experience. Unlike many other TVs, it's impossible to switch out of PC or Game Mode when the TV detects a PC or game console.

The Roku Pro TV supports most common resolutions up to 4k @ 120Hz, although, unfortunately, it doesn't support 1440p @ 60Hz on AMD cards without scaling; on NVIDIA cards, 1440p @ 60Hz works fine when forced on NVIDIA cards. It displays chroma 4:4:4 signals properly, but not at 1080p @ 120Hz and 1440p @ 120Hz; chroma 4:4:4 works fine at all other resolution and refresh rate combos.

The TV is fully compatible with everything the PS5 offers, like 1440p @ 60Hz and 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz, as well as HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag.

The Roku Pro Series 2024 is compatible with almost everything the Xbox Series X|S offers, including 1440p @ 120Hz, 4k @ 120Hz with Dolby Vision, and HDMI Forum VRR. It also supports Auto Low Latency Mode, so you don't have to worry about manually switching to Game Mode to get the lowest input lag. Unfortunately, it doesn't work well at 1440p @ 60Hz, as the only way to achieve that combination on the Xbox is by forcing it through HDMI override, which disables HDR and ALLM.

The TV has HDMI 2.1 bandwidth on HDMI ports 1 and 2, with both supporting up to 4k @ 120Hz. Fortunately, HDMI 4 is the eARC port, so you don't lose a high-bandwidth port when you plug a soundbar into the TV. The TV supports all HDR formats but doesn't support ATSC 3.0, so over-the-air broadcasts are limited to 1080p.

Unfortunately, this TV can't passthrough advanced DTS audio formats over eARC, which is disappointing as many UHD Blu-ray discs use these as their main audio track. It also can't pass any 5.1 audio formats through optical, like DTS 5.1 and Dolby Digital 5.1, but they work fine through ARC.

The Roku Pro has a decent frequency response. Like most TVs, there's very little bass response, with nearly no thump or rumble. Dialogue sounds very clear, even at maximum volume, although the TV really doesn't get loud.

The TV's handling of sound distortion is decent. There's some distortion at maximum volume, but not enough to be noticeable by most people. At moderate listening volumes, however, the TV's distortion performance is better, good enough for most.

This TV runs version 13 of the Roku TV smart interface, which is very simple, with fewer animations and a simpler user interface than you'll get with more premium TVs. It's very fast, though, and quite intuitive. Unfortunately, we experienced occasional black screens during our testing; this happened when changing inputs and settings and happened across all HDMI ports and with multiple cables.

Unfortunately, like all Roku TVs we've tested, there are large ads on the home screen, and you can't get rid of them.

There's a great selection of streaming apps to choose from, and most of the more popular streaming services are available.

This TV comes with a motion-sensitive backlit remote. You can access voice controls through the remote or the Roku companion app, and the remote has a mute switch on its side in case you want to keep the remote from listening to your environment; this disables voice control. There are a few quick access buttons for popular streaming services. The remote has an integrated rechargeable battery, and you can recharge it with the included USB-C charging cable. The remote has a quick select button, giving you access to two quick-shortcut options, which you can set to apps and other options.

The power button is on the right side of the TV when looking at it from the front. You can use it to change inputs, go to the home screen, or power on and off the TV. It also has a dedicated button to activate the find remote feature in case you lose your remote somewhere in your house.

• Remote (with charging cable)
• Power cable
• Documentation
• Stickers

It looks like the TV also comes with a TV placement guide, but our unit didn't come with one.