While far from a TV to get excited about, the bright picture and strong smart platform make the 2-Series Fire TV well worth considering when it’s on sale

When Amazon first announced that it was moving into selling its own brand of TV hardware, expectations weren’t high. Surely the resulting sets were just going to be OEM knockoffs with no more ambition than providing a built-in home for Amazon’s Fire TV operating system and undercutting more established rivals on price, right?

Happily (for cash-strapped consumers and Amazon, anyway) the Amazon TVs we’ve seen so far have largely proved those initial expectations wrong. For, while they do indeed carry Amazon’s Fire TV interface and cost relatively little, with the exception of the awful 43-inch Omni QLED they’ve also performed much better than expected. Can this trend really continue, though, with the most entry-level model in Amazon’s current TV offering, the 32-inch Fire TV 2-Series?

Price

While officially priced at £250 / $200, you should expect to pay significantly less for the 32-inch Fire TV 2-Series. That’s because it is regularly and drastically discounted. At the time of writing, for example, it’s available for just £190 / $130. And before any Brits ask, no, Amazon US won’t ship the set to the UK.

You don’t have to be a market analyst to realise that a 32-inch TV with a sophisticated smart system for less than £200 / $150 looks like great value. But if you want a bit more context, the Sony 32W800/W830 we recently looked at costs £299 / $298.

Design

You probably won’t be shocked to learn that the 32-inch Amazon Fire TV 2 Series’ design is fairly basic. The dark grey frame around the screen is a little wider than we typically see these days, and the addition of a glossy finish to its outer edge does little to hide the build’s heavy reliance on bog-standard plastic. 

The two feet the TV stands on if you’re not hanging it on the wall continue the basic feeling, again being built from lightweight glossy plastic and delivering an almost perfect example of function over form.

The set’s back sticks out substantially too, making it a rather awkward option for wall mounting. 

The remote control supplied with the Fire TV 2 is essentially the same as those you get with Amazon’s Fire TV sticks. Which is fine by us, actually, as it means it features a compact but ergonomic shape, a handy collection of four direct streaming app access buttons, a clearly marked Amazon Alexa mic button at its top, and an easy-to-find-without-looking circular menu navigation and select area.

Features

The Amazon Fire TV 2 Series’ headline features are, of course, its built-in Fire TV smart system, with all the expansive app and streaming service support that brings, and its low price. 

Fire TV isn’t perhaps the simplest, most streamlined smart interface around. It also took around 20 minutes to complete multiple software updates during initial installation. On the upside, though, once updated the Fire TV OS runs slickly, remained bug-free throughout our time with the TV, carries all the key video streaming services most people will need, and is bolstered in the UK by the Freeview Play system for bringing together all the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster catch-up services. 

Fire OS also features the excellent Amazon Alexa voice control system, of course, while much of the Fire TV operating system will be familiar to anyone used to the way the Prime Video streaming app operates. 

Amazon’s entry-level TV is built around an HD Ready (1366×768), VA-type LCD panel that is lit by LEDs positioned directly behind the screen rather than around its edges. This configuration bodes well for contrast but could lead to viewing angle limitations. Note that the 40-inch version of the Fire TV 2 Series features a Full HD resolution.

There’s support even at this level of the market for the HDR10 and HLG high dynamic range formats, but Amazon’s set won’t take in and downscale 4K sources in the way that one or two other HD TVs can – not that that is likely to be an issue that most buyers ever experience.

Gamers won’t be surprised to hear that a TV this cheap only supports frame rates up to 60Hz over its three HDMI ports – though it does carry a Game preset that gets the time the screen takes to render gaming images down to a pretty respectable 35.5ms. One of the HDMIs supports the HDMI Audio Return Channel (ARC) feature, while other ports include a tuner, a 3.5mm AV input, an IR Emitter port, an optical audio output, an ethernet port and a 5V USB 2.0 port. 

Picture and sound features are understandably limited. There are a handful of reasonably well thought-through picture presets, plus Local Contrast Enhancement and Dynamic Contrast features which, as we’ll see in the next section, can actually feel a bit at odds with each other. There are a couple of welcome options, too, for tweaking the way the screen handles motion, with the Natural Cinema option being our recommendation for any time you’re watching 24p movies. 

Picture

Two things strike us right away about the Amazon Fire TV Series-2’s picture quality – one good, one bad. 

The good one is its brightness. Images pop off the screen with an intensity seldom seen in today’s small screen world – especially the sort of very affordable end of today’s small screen world in which the Fire TV 2-Series sits. This instantly makes the TV a good bet for a relatively bright environment such as a conservatory or kitchen.

The bad picture stand-out is colour saturation. Colours across the board look washed out, so that skin tones typically look pale and sickly, floral greens and sky blues don’t look natural, and heavily saturated primary tones look muted and flat.

We try what we can to improve this issue, of course, by ramping up the colour saturation setting and using a warm colour temperature setting, but with little useful effect. The first option makes a marginal improvement to tonal richness but still doesn’t get things where we want them to be and tends to exaggerate an issue where supposedly subtle colour blends can sometimes look slightly coarse. The second option, meanwhile, just makes colours look more jaundiced. 

The bottom line is that the Fire TV 2-Series just doesn’t have the colour weapons in its arsenal to keep up with its impressive brightness. A fact that can also cause some quite noticeable clipping (lost shading and detail) in the brightest parts of HDR pictures.

Most of the other news regarding the Fire TV 2 Series 32-inch pictures, though, is positive. Movies and TV shows look clean and sharp despite the screen not mustering a full 1080p resolution, and motion appears crisp and credible regardless of whether you’re watching sport or a 24p film (though remember that for the latter you should activate the Natural Cinema processing option). 

It’s great to see, too, the VA panel delivering some quite credible black colours during dark scenes despite the screen’s impressive brightness. There’s a little greyness hanging over dark scenes for sure, but it’s subtle enough to not overly distract and there’s no sign of the blue or green undertones that dark scenes can sometimes take on with other relatively cheap TVs.

Shadow detail is impressively evident, too. Actually a bit too evident at times, as the Fire TV 2-Series’ natural effervescence when it comes to brightness can sometimes bring out a bit more background detail in dark scenes than we are really meant to see, along with the noise that such supposedly hidden bits tend to be accompanied by. We would still take this any day, though, over the miserable, flattening glowing grey wash that hangs over all dark scenes on the recently reviewed Sony KD-32W800.

Getting the best out of the 32-inch Fire TV 2 Series’ pictures does mean figuring your way around the set’s Local Contrast Enhancement and Dynamic Contrast features. The LCE option can have a big impact on the picture, with its High setting causing details to suddenly get crushed out of dark scenes, while the Low setting brings out far too much detail that should have been hidden in the shadows. So definitely go for the Medium option with this setting – and once you’ve done that, you’ll find the Dynamic Contrast option best set to High or Low. Strangely, the Medium and Off options really don’t seem to play nicely with the LCE system.

The Fire TV 2 Series-2 pictures hold up from wider viewing angles than we would have expected given that it uses a VA panel – further bolstering its potential as a particularly effective kitchen or conservatory TV.

In fact, while the faded colours are an ever-present flaw, the Fire TV 2 Series’s pictures are overall never less than fun to watch. And that’s really more than you probably have a right to hope for from such an affordable TV.

Sound

The 32-inch Amazon Fire TV 2-Series carries a surprisingly rich range of audio features, including a dialogue enhancer, a volume leveller, and a wide roster of content-based presets. 

These varied options are backed up by a pretty respectable performance from the TV’s two 8W speakers. Dialogue sounds well-rounded and fairly well contextualised, for starters – though male voices can become a touch muffled at high volumes. Detail levels are generally quite good, without trebles becoming too harsh or exposed.

The sound is propelled out of the TV well enough to create a reasonably spacious soundstage, and while there’s ultimately a pretty defined upper limit on how loud it can get, it does have enough volume and dynamic range headroom to shift through at least a few gears during a loud escalating action or horror movie set-piece.

Amazon’s TV avoids obvious distortions at high volumes, too, leaving as its one weakness some frustratingly inconsistent bass. There’s either not really any bass presence at all, or else it’s suddenly making an appearance accompanied by uncomfortable amounts of speaker distortion. 

To be fair, though, the bass distortion fails are fairly few and far between, and for most of the time the 32-inch Amazon Fire TV 2-Series sounds pleasant enough.

Verdict

The 32-inch Fire TV 2-Series is almost an absolute bargain. Its pictures are bright and crisp, its sound is detailed and punchy, its Fire TV OS works as well as it does on more expensive Amazon TVs (or Amazon Fire TV Sticks), and perhaps best of all it’s very aggressively priced for a little TV that does so much.

Its pale colours are what primarily hold it back from a solid four-star verdict, but it’s still well worth considering if you need a cheap, bright and smart TV for a conservatory or kitchen – particularly when it’s in one of its regular discount periods.

SCORES

• Picture 3
• Sound 3
• Features 4

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