OnePlus TV review: A feature-rich smart TV
As OnePlus first arrived on the scene a few years ago, nobody knew just what to expect from this tiny Chinese company. Since then, it has risen to a leading position in India ‘s luxury smartphone market, thus challenging the likes of Apple and Samsung. What’s the next move for this quickly expanding enterprise? Televisions, of course.
Although the smartphones of OnePlus are no longer as cheap as they used to be, they typically do have distinct quality and performance advantages over the competition, which helps with their sales. OnePlus now aims to do the same for TVs, joining companies like Xiaomi and Motorola in launching TVs in India.
The OnePlus TV Q1 Pro Priced at Rs. 99,900. The OnePlus TV Q1 Pro is the more expensive of the two TV versions that OnePlus launched, the other being Rs. 69,900 OnePlus TV Q1. The Pro edition has a lot to do like a QLED screen with a 55-inch 4 K display, smart connectivity, and a special motorized soundbar integrated into the TV itself.
OnePlus TV review: OnePlus Q1 Pro design and specifications
Similar to the OnePlus phones, the company has made several significant strides to differentiate smart TV from the rest. Three has been a lot of focus on the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro, making this a much more appealing TV than other alternatives in the mid-range and luxury price range.
The 55-inch 4K panel has slim borders all around, and a small, discreet OnePlus logo in the middle of the bottom bezel.
There is a carbon fiber finish on the back of the OnePlus TV, which is good to have if you use the table stand and place this TV where the rear might be visible.
The stand’s ‘spine’ is a long bar that is fixed to the TV at two stages — one in the middle and one at the top. The scale of these attachment points may not inspire a great deal of faith in their reliability, but there’s obviously no way to say how they will turn out to be one way or the other.
The stand itself looks decent, and the traditional TV design style is different. However, we felt it was distracting us somewhat from the screen, which is naturally the most important part of any TV.
Because there is some space between the frame and the screen, you’ll need a large enough table to comfortably put the screen on, even if the foundation doesn’t have a massive footprint.
The TV is fairly small and has just one panel for the ports facing horizontally to the right of the screen. This package has a magnetic cover with a narrow opening for the power cord, and maybe one cable (such as an HDMI cable) to go in, but depending on how many cables and devices you have attached to this LED.
There are four HDMI ports, two USB ports, an Ethernet port, a Toslink port for digital optical audio and a single AV-in socket which can be linked to older non-HDMI systems with an optional adapter
One feature that certainly stands out from the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro and sets it apart from other options in its price category — the motorized soundbar. This is also the only distinction between the Q1 and Q1 Pro OnePlus TVs.
The soundbar features eight front-firing speakers — two woofers, four full-range drivers, and two tweeters — giving a complete 50W sound quality. If the TV is off or in standby mode, the soundbar will sit at the rear of the TV within its fabric-wrapped cover. The soundbar rolls forward when turned on and stretches outward below the screen
The entire process is quiet and very spectacular to look at, with soundbar lights drawing your eyes to the motorized action. It brings more flair and elegance to the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro that we liked quite a bit.
If you don’t want that or are concerned about burning out the motor, you may opt to allow the soundbar to remain permanently extended, through the settings of OnePlus TV. The light settings cannot be changed, so it is worth remembering that when wall-mounted, the soundbar allows the Screen to stand out just a bit more than normal.
The OnePlus TV has a 55 “QLED screen with 3840×2160 pixel resolution. The panel features local dimming for improved black tones, although it hasn’t defined the number of dimming zones — it seems to be a good number. The TV supports HDR on all four HDMI ports, up to the Dolby Vision format and 4 K resolution.
OnePlus TV review: Q1 Pro remote and features
Some tv manufactures have already been creative with the remote concept, but OnePlus is taking it one-touch further. Minimalism seems to be the trend here, and the remote is, of course, attentive in its style and layout, making it more like the video viewing system of Apple TV.
The metal package is sleek, lightweight, and looks really decent and it also sounds fantastic. It is operated by an integrated battery and can be recharged via its USB Type-C port. While we were unable to check the battery life of the device, we do expect it to run between charges for a few weeks, if not longer.
The remote itself has only a few buttons to do away with lots of choices you’d imagine were necessary. There’s no dedicated power button, much like the Apple TV remote — the OnePlus button has several functions, including power management.
There are a navigation D-pad, home, and back keys, a voice order, and general query Google Assistant button, and options button, and an Amazon Prime Video hotkey. The volume controls are on the right side of the remote in the shape of a rocker and while at first, it looked a little odd, we got used to it soon enough.
When the TV is off, the OnePlus button turns it on with a short press, and when on, a long press brings up the power menu. You can let the OnePlus TV run down the 15-second timer and put the TV to sleep (the same as standby on most televisions), power it down completely, or restart it like with a smartphone. We missed having a dedicated button to switch between source devices (the TV starts by default on the Android TV home screen) and a mute button to quickly silence the audio.
All of this gives us the impression that OnePlus wants to bring existing smartphone design and software philosophies to the TV. The OnePlus TV experiences are smartphone-like too.
It’s a very cool design but maybe it’s too simplistic and would take a lot of relearning. This would include the positioning of keys, the use of apps to monitor items that would have been available with the phone, and even relying heavily on Google Assistant getting around.
Much like most other Android TVs, the OnePlus TV has built-in Chromecast, and uses what the company calls a Gamma Color Magic processor for image processing. Ironically, there’s a pop-out cover at the top of the TV that reveals a USB Type C slot. This port ‘s function is not specified but it may be used in the future for a webcam or any other attachable accessories.
The TV also supports HDMI CEC, allowing the OnePlus remote to be used to monitor HDMI products such as Blu-Ray players and streaming dongles such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4 K
OnePlus TV review: Q1 Pro software, interface, and the OnePlus Connect app
Some early reports indicated that OnePlus TV will be developed on top of Android TV with its own custom firmware, but the end result is not exactly what we were expecting. OnePlus TV runs on Android TV, but has limited customizations of apps, including Oxygen Play, and improved mobile functionality through the OnePlus Connect App.
What we end up with is not exactly the same as the stock version of Android TV we’ve seen recently on the Sony A9 G, but it’s pretty similar to that and the main interface is familiar. The variations are small, and only on the home screen and in the Google Play Store are seen. Many famous applications including streaming platforms, social media apps, and gaming are available.
Apps that are supported, including YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, and Hotstar, are the typical versions that are available for smart TVs, and all of them support content streaming at up to 4K resolution along with HDR and Dolby Vision.
The OxygenPlay is the interface’s greatest addition. It sites on the home screen a host of selected content from various streaming providers and allows you quick access through the remote. Currently, the service has numerous Hungama Music, Zee5, and Eros Now movies and TV shows.
We noticed that while we wanted active subscriptions from Zee5 and Eros Now, and had to sign into their respective apps for their content to work, Hungama Play worked directly via OxygenPlay.
It comes in handy, giving the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro a ready catalog of content streaming without having to subscribe. The available content was decent as well, with a good collection of movies and shows across genres.
The OnePlus TV triggers the screensaver while not in use for any time, and is by default a series of ‘Shot on OnePlus’ images, along with screens that display the time and environment. This screensaver can be personalized, and when the television was idle we liked to see fun pictures pop up.
At times we considered the app to be a little buggy and it certainly did not live up to the excitement and aspirations that OnePlus generated. Another example of this is the failure to recall the photo mode commonly used when the TV is set to Dolby Vision, which has its own different image settings, switching back will always turn the picture mode into one we didn’t like, adding extra steps to the process of restoring the previous settings.
OnePlus has advertised the integration of smartphone-TV in the build-up to the launch of OnePlus TV, and one of these apps is the OnePlus Connect app. The app has a lot of features that can be used with TV, but demands that both the mobile and TV be wired to the same Wi-Fi network.
The software helps you to use your mobile as a touch remote for OnePlus TV, toggle between applications easily and browse through OxygenPlay content as well. We also liked the local casting feature which allowed us to cast video files on our smartphone quickly and efficiently.
This performed well with short clips but when we attempted to upload longer clips we faced synchronization problems. Another function that OnePlus proclaims is TypeSync, which helps you to enter text into the application on the TV from a connected smartphone.
OnePlus TV review: Q1 Pro performance
While we actually favor OLED displays for the superior degrees of darkness that they can achieve, QLED displays have their own advantages. QLED, or the Quantum-Dot LED, is a screen technology mainly developed and marketed by Samsung.
We were not dissatisfied with this option for OnePlus TV and enjoyed the kit as a whole, from the specs and features to the quality of the picture and sound.
With a range of content like live video around common resolutions and HDR formats, we tested the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro as well as our own test data. We used both the TV’s smart app and an Amazon Fire TV Stick 4 K to display Netflix content in Dolby Vision HDR.
Once we first switched on the TV, we considered the color and image tuning to be a long way off, but we were able to repair it with some diligent settings change, but we’re not sure if other people would be able to do it.
We began with Our Planet on Netflix as we still do with a new Top-End TV, streaming with Dolby Vision in 4 K resolution. The first thing we found is that some of the image settings of the TV are disabled while watching content from Dolby Vision, but that is not a bad thing at all because the tuning is based on color accuracy and sharpness.
The series looks simply brilliant due to the use of a QLED screen, with natural colors, high peak lighting, strong contrast, and excellent detail. The Television was searingly light in the most brightly illuminated scenes, but nonetheless fun to watch.
Dolby Vision material is designed to bring out the best on any screen, but we were still pleased with the efficiency of the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro. Output with HDR10 material was identical. Nevertheless, we found that in certain scenes colors were often overexposed to HDR10 content.
Standard 4 K content also looks good. Colors looked fine here, but in contrast with Dolby Vision and even HDR10, they appeared somewhat amped up and a little too punchy. Nevertheless, we liked the OnePlus TV’s picture clarity in terms of colors and sharpness, particularly when compared with more affordable 4 K LED versions.
Black depths were fairly great but not exactly the same as on a good OLED TV like the Sony A9G. The local dimming option — which is on by choice — makes a major difference here, raising black conditions without blooming too dramatically.
The high number of local dimming zones means that the problems of blooming and color are held to a minimum which helps in their success.
We were pleased with the picture quality of the full-HD video, with the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro doing a good upscaling job to provide image clarity that was almost on par with native 4 K video.
With plenty of visible pixelation and blurred edges, the high definition video falls a little short on price. Of course, OnePlus wants to cater to tech-savvy consumers who are unlikely to see a lot of standard-definition content, but the odd old YouTube video or even SD-resolution TV channels on OnePlus TV weren’t as fun as we might have wanted.
The OnePlus TV Q1 Pro is among the best looking televisions, thanks to the soundbar. The front-firing configuration, the numerous speakers, and the loudness make this a decent audio device, with the Q1 Pro mostly denying the need for a different soundbar or speaker system.
We felt a decent amount of kick to the bass and sharpness in the highs, and were very impressed with how clean and well-tuned the sound was.
On OnePlus TV Q1 Pro we tested Dolby Atmos using one of our test clips — a Dolby Atmos sampler file created by Dolby Labs itself.
Audio quality was excellent, and we could sense good spatial tuning in the tone, along with a sense of authenticity and naturalism that we haven’t seen from any other tv.
There isn’t a lot of Dolby Atmos content available, so we’ve mainly focused on the traditional Dolby 5.1-channel tuning that big streaming platforms typically use. It sounds very good too.
OnePlus TV review: Verdict
In our view, The OnePlus TV Q1 Pro is an ambitious first attempt that gets many things right. We enjoyed the quality of the images, appreciated the consistency of the sound, and noticed plenty to make this TV stand out in the software. It’s a daring innovation that seeks to improve the way TVs work in tiny but effective ways.
There are some problems here — including a remote that is too simplistic, sluggish apps, and picture quality that takes a lot of tweaking to get going and still isn’t perfect — but this is a device that performs well for the most part.
With this TV perhaps the main issue is its cost. OnePlus may be well known in the phone space, and consumers may be willing to pay huge sums on their phones, but we’re not sure if OnePlus will carry the popularity into the television sector.
Buyers looking to invest so much on a TV will definitely be willing to go with more proven companies like Sony, Samsung, and LG, rather than take a gamble with a much smaller manufacturer on a first-generation model. This is a decent television for the quality, but it may be difficult to persuade the consumer of this.
Objectively reviewing the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro we like what’s on sale. The overall bundle may contain a lot of theatrics and excitement about a TV that functions like a smartphone (which isn’t necessarily a positive thing), but the OnePlus TV Q1 Pro is a TV that we’ve enjoyed living with, and so if you’re looking at a nice, mid-premium choice, you might.
Pros
- Looks good
- Motorised soundbar is a nice touch
- The panel can get really bright
- Possible to get good performance with HDR, 4K, and full-HD content
- Excellent sound quality
Cons
- Below-average picture quality with SD content
- Lots of artefacts visible in scenes with rapid motion
OnePlus TV review: Specification
Brand | OnePlus |
Model Name | Q1 Series |
Product Dimensions | 122.4 x 6.1 x 76 cm; 22.2 Kilograms |
Memory Storage Capacity | 16 GB |
Ram Memory Installed Size | 3 GB |
Operating System | Android |
Hardware Interface | USB, HDMI |
Graphics Coprocessor | Mali G51 MP3 |
Resolution | 4K |
Remote Control Type | IR, Bluetooth |
Display Technology | QLED |
Standing screen display size | 55 Inches |
Viewing Angle | 178 Degrees |
Image Aspect Ratio | 16:09 |
Screen Resolution | 3840 x 2160 pixels |
Resolution | 3840×2160 Pixels |
Audio Output Mode | Stereo |
Audio Wattage | 50 Watts |
Wattage | 50 Watts |
Power Source | AC |
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