Toshiba Amazon Fire TV 2018 TV Review

The design of this Toshiba Fire TV Edition is decent. It is made of plastic and does not have a premium look to it. Its build quality is ok with no gaps or other issues. It will get warm to the touch on the lower edge without that being a problem.  The stand supports the TV well although some wobbling is to be expected. If you decide to wall mount it will not protrude much, and the inputs will be accessible as they are all facing outwards.

The stand of the Toshiba Fire TV Edition 2018 is plastic and curvy. It supports the TV well although the TV will wobble a little back and forth if knocked gently. It does not lift the TV very high from the table and it protrudes a little in front of the TV. This might prevent you from placing a soundbar in front.

Footprint of the 55" model: 29.1" x 12.1"

The back of the TV is plastic. Some of the inputs are facing sideways and some downwards to facilitate access in case of wall mounting. There is no planning for cable management.

The borders of the Toshiba Fire TV 2018 look ok and have an average thickness.

The TV is a little thick when viewed from the side and thus it will protrude a little if you mount it on a wall. Most people will not consider this to be an issue.

The built quality is decent. The TV is made out of plastic and there are no gaps or loose parts and you should have no issues with the TV.

The native contrast is remarkable. It allows the TV to display nice, deep blacks in dim environments, thus enhancing the picture quality.

The Toshiba Fire TV Edition 2018 does not support Local Dimming.

The Toshiba Fire TV has good SDR peak brightness. It sustains a remarkably steady level of brightness throughout the various window sizes which is great.

The HDR peak Brightness is decent. Just like in the SDR tests this TV sustains the same level of brightness at all window sizes. However the level is just not enough to accurately deliver the HDR content as intended by its creator.

If you find HDR content too dim see our HDR recommended settings.

The gray uniformity of the Toshiba Fire TV Edition is mediocre. Some clouding is apparent almost all over the screen and also in the middle. Thus some dirty screen effect is visible while watching sports. In darker images, things are slightly better but the shadows are not completely eliminated.

The viewing angles of the Toshiba Fire TV are bad. As soon as you deviate from the center, blacks look washed out, colors shift and eventually, brightness diminishes. This is not a good TV for viewing from the side.

Excellent black uniformity. The area around the test cross show very little, almost unnoticeable clouding and this adds points to the nice picture quality in dark scenes this TV can display.

The Toshiba Fire TV has a semi-gloss finish for diffusing reflections across the screen. It does a good job in less bright environments, but when in well-lit rooms the reflections can be a little distracting. This becomes more of a problem when the light source is facing the screen.

This TV has terrible out-of-the-box color settings. There are no preset picture modes to chose from and you can only 'play' with the Red, Green and Blue values. The White balance dE was at 10.38 and the color dE was at 5.55, both much higher than our threshold of 3 where people start noticing the inaccuracies. The colors were cold and a blueish tone was slightly apparent. Gamma was the closest to our target of 2.2

The color accuracy is passable after post calibration. You can only adjust three parameters Red, Green and Blue and choose a color mode. Thus we were not able to reduce neither the white balance dE nor the color dE, below our threshold of 3. The results were better with Gamma which was right on target at 2.2 and the color temperature which was much closer to our 6500K target.

You can find our recommended calibration settings here.

Upscaling of low-quality content such as DVDs looks good.

720p sources such as cable TV are upscaled well. Details remain clear.

1080p content such as Blu-rays look sharp and detailed.

When viewing 4k images from up close, some sub-pixel dimming is visible which introduces artifacts. This may be a type of spatial dithering and results in a checkerboard effect similar to the TCL 5 Series. You can see this effect up close in our pixels photo here.

Some sub-pixel dimming artifacts are noticeable. This isn't noticeable from farther away, but for those who sit close such as for a PC monitor it is noticeable. This is similar to the TCL P Series.

The color gamut of this TV is decent. It covers about 3/4 of the DCI P3 xy color space, but fails to reach the 67% of the Rec 2020 uv to be classified as having a wide color gamut.

The color accuracy at our normal 75% stimulus brightness is bad, because the TV is prioritizing brightness over color accuracy; however at 50% stimulus brightness the accuracy of P3 and Rec 2020 colors are vastly improved. This means that most HDR colors will have passable color accuracy, but very bright colors will be washed out.

In the Natural HDR picture mode, the TV's EOTF follows the target PQ curve fairly closely, with some over-brightening in dim shades. If you find HDR content too dark, you can set the Low Luminance Gamma setting to -5, which raises the EOTF and brightens most of the scene; enabling the HDR Tone Mapping setting in addition to the Gamma -5 setting brightens the EOTF even more. The EOTFs in the Game and PC picture modes are almost identical to that of Natural.

Disappointing color volume for this Toshiba Fire TV. The TV cannot fill the color volume mainly because of its limited color gamut. It cannot produce rich or vivid colors to please the viewers.

The Toshiba Fire TV has a very good gradient as many areas have no visible banding at all. There are a few spots of medium banding, however, such as in dark gray and green.

There is no gradient smoothing feature, but the noise reduction features may reduce banding in low-quality content.

No image retention for the Toshiba Fire TV 2018.

We don't expect VA panels to experience permanent image retention, as the VA panel in our long-term test appears immune.

Impressive response time. There is practically no overshooting in most transitions and the TV behaves uniformly across various luminosity changes from one state to the other. It will keep most people happy.

The Toshiba Fire TV flickers the Backlight to dim the screen. This happens at all backlight values, except at the maximum. The TV flicker its backlight at 220Hz which is not a multiple of 60Hz and this results in some artifacts in fast moving objects.

The Toshiba Fire TV Edition does not have a BFI option.

Decent motion interpolation performance, as it is nearly perfect during slow-moving shots and stops when there is too much motion.

Some artifacts were present during our testing when Motion Processing (Motion interpolation) was set to enhanced. Setting Motion Processing to standard or smooth makes the algorithm more conservative, and although motion is less smooth, there are also less artifacts present. So if you find artifacts bothersome, you should choose the lower setting.

Update 07/23/2018: We have received reports that the 43" and 50" models do not support motion interpolation as they lack the Motion Processing option.

The Toshiba Fire TV has a fast response time and thus will display some stutter in slow frame rate content. However, using motion interpolation can improve the situation by a lot.

When displaying 24fps content the TV will always have judder and there is no judder removal feature. The only way to remove judder is to enable motion interpolation (soap opera effect), but this makes motion look much smoother than normal and occasionally adds artifacts.

This TV does not support VRR.

This Toshiba Fire TV has good low input lag, but you must be careful to follow our settings described below to experience the lowest possible input lag.

4:4:4 chroma subsampling only shown properly when the signal is RGB, and only in the PC picture mode. In PC mode, when a 4k @ 60Hz @ RGB HDMI signal is first sent it will have low input lag (37.2 ms), but if the picture mode is changed and then changed back to PC, PC mode will no longer have low input lag (70.0 ms); luckily changing picture modes doesn't happen often in normal usage. The Motion Processing setting (motion interpolation) must be disabled for PC mode to have low input lag.

The Amazon Fire has a decent support of various input resolutions. Here are some of the resolutions restrictions that you should be aware:

4k @ 60Hz @ 4:4:4 or 4:2:2 is only supported when HDMI Input Mode is set to Mode 2 (2.0).

1080p @ 60 @ 4:4:4 and 4k @ 60 @ 4:4:4 is only properly displayed in RGB. When in YCbCr chroma, 4:4:4 is not properly displayed.

4k @ 60Hz @ 4:4:4 + HDR works, but 4:4:4 is only properly displayed in RGB.

1440p @ 60Hz and 4k @ 30Hz can't have proper 4:4:4 chroma even when in PC mode.

Sharpness at -25 means no added sharpness in PC mode.