New Fire TV Omni QLED: Amazon Gets A Creepy Detection Feature

    The Fire TV Omni QLED has ambient light and presence sensors to automatically react to its environment.
    Amazon
    

    Amazon is getting serious about its televisions. The new Fire TV Omni QLED series promises better picture quality and features than the company’s existing TVs, and includes a new “ambient” experience that uses sensors to detect your presence in the room.
    All that comes at a price aimed squarely at midrange models from established brands like?Samsung,?TCL and Vizio. The new models were announced as part of Amazon’s device event on Wednesday. The Fire TV Omni QLED series comes in two sizes — a 65-inch model for $800 and a 75-inch one for $1,100 — and is available for preorder now.
    
Your TV knows you’re here
    Just like the existing Omni Fire TV, the new models respond to Alexa voice commands hand-free, but they also take it a step further. “When not streaming, the Omni QLED Series uses its built-in presence sensors to detect when a person enters the room and switches to the beautiful and informative Ambient Experience,” says Amazon’s press release. If it sounds creepy to you, you’re not alone.
    When the sensors detect you’re in the room, the screen fires up to show artwork, widgets or other content. Art is drawn from a collection of 1,500 photos and fine art and it includes collections from The National Gallery of Art and The Art Institute of Chicago. And unlike Samsung’s The Frame TVs, all the the art is free on the Omni QLED. If you don’t want it to show art the TV can also display your own photo collection.
    
    On-screen widgets can appear as part of the ambient experience.
    Amazon
    The TV can also show a series of widgets, for example calendars, reminders, sticky notes or news headlines, and they can control smart home devices like thermostats and Ring doorbells. You can also ask the TV to play music, with or without the screen on.?
    The system can understand the context of the environment. It’ll automatically turn on during the day, for example, but not at night. You can use a physical switch on the TV to disconnect the microphones. There’s also a “do not disturb” function that disables the ambient experience during certain hours, and a setting in the menu to completely turn off presence detection. Amazon says there’s no identity detection of data transferred about the use of the feature.
    Fire TV Omni QLED’s Ambient experience seems similar to modes on Samsung and LG TVs, both of which put art and widgets on the screen when the TV is turned off, but with the added automation of presence sensors. The idea of a TV that detects your presence is likewise nothing new — Sony did it way back in 2009 as a way to save power, for example — but none of those TV manufacturers have the same kind of artificial intelligence and data background as Amazon Alexa.
    An omnibus of picture enhancements
    Even if you chose to disable all the “ambient” features, the Omni QLED could be compelling from a picture quality standpoint. They feature?full-array local dimming, a feature that typically improves?contrast and?HDR by independently controlling brightness in various areas of the screen. The number of zones controls how precise the dimming can be, and while more zones doesn’t necessarily mean better picture quality, in?my experience as a TV reviewer it usually helps. The Omni QLED has 80 zones on the 65-inch model and 96 on the 75-incher, which is more than the?Vizio MQX?for example, but less than the?TCL 6-Series.