Xiaomi Mi TV 5X review: Does most things right

Chinese technology company Xiaomi has launched new budget Android TVs as part of the Mi TV 5X series. Three models have been unveiled-- 43-inch, 50-inch and 55-inch-- with the price starting from Rs 31,999.

We got our hands on the 55-inch variant of the Mi TV 5X, which comes at Rs 45,999 and here are our key takeaways from the device.

Design

The Xiaomi Mi TV 5X is a lightweight unit despite being a 55-inch one in that it can be easily lifted by a person with both hands. You do not need the assistance of someone else to place the TV unit or move it around your house. However, you may require the help of someone for fixing the two stands or mounting the TV on a wall.

There are about 2cm thick bezels along the top, left and right edges of the display. A thicker (about 4cm thick) metal strip runs along the bottom of the display and has got the Xiaomi logo in between.

The overall look is mostly a slim, rectangular one, with the backside of the TV not taking too much space.


At the back, there are some ports provided for connectivity like 3 HDMI 2.1 ports, 2 USB ports, ethernet, AV, optical input and a 3.5mm port.

Display

The TV's Picture mode gives you four options- Standard, Vivid, Sport and Movie.

At Standard mode, which is best recommended if you are watching the news or some other real-time program, the colours appear crisp, richly infused and yet natural. The vivid mode would be best for watching nature documentaries and videos. The colours pop out in Vivid mode and if you love watching channels like National Geographic and any wildlife-related content, you are in for a treat with the Vivid mode. 4K videos look stunning, with rich details and refreshing colour saturation.

The Movie mode does not drastically alter the brightness as someone would expect but the change is a slight one. The same goes for the Sport mode.

Xiaomi claims that it has added all the popular HDR codecs to this TV and that the display has a 10-bit colour depth with 94% DCI-P3 for more and truer colours, which could explain the deep saturation in the display colours in any Picture mode.

Broadly speaking, the TV's display does a balanced job in making the visuals come out nicely on the screen, without adding anything in excess.

Performance

Let’s give you an idea about how receptive the Google Assistant was to our voice. With the TV about 1.5 metres away from us, we tried giving spoken commands to Google Assistant first on YouTube, with mixed results. Actually, we had to shout from a distance of about 1.5 metres to make the YouTube Google Assistant voice understand and interpret correctly what was being said.

With just the Google Assistant access via the dedicated button, the voice typing was easier as the AI assistant could interpret our voice quite easily from a distance of about 4 metres without us having to resort to shouting at the TV. The AI assistant responded correctly to each query within 2-3 seconds of it having been asked and interpreted the voice commands accurately.

You can adjust the backlight, brightness, contrast saturation etc from the TV settings.

The Mi TV 5X (50 and 55-inch models) comes with 40W stereo speakers with Dolby Atmos support and they also come with a bigger speaker cavity (0.8 litres) compared to the smaller, 43-inch model. The 43-inch variant has got 30W speakers, by the way.

There are five sound modes- Standard, Movie, News, Game and Custom. In Custom mode, you can tweak the equaliser details.

There is a Dolby sound setting but it can only be enabled manually. Go to Settings, tap ‘Device Preferences’, then, ‘Sound’. Under ‘Sound’, you will be able to see the option of ‘Dolby sounds’. Now, you will see two options: Dolby Audio Processing and Dolby Atmos. Selecting the first will also auto-select the second.

There are two other important sound settings: A ‘Surround Virtualiser’ setting and a ‘Dialogue Enhancer’ setting which is part of Dolby Audio Processing only but can only be seen upon toggling the Dolby Audio Processing option.

Does toggling the Dolby Audio Processing make a great difference? Not great but a lot, certainly especially if you set the Surround Virtualiser setting to high (three options here; low, medium and high) and if you are listening to music on the Mi TV 5X.

With the Dialogue Enhancer at High, we noticed that the male voice in a film got slightly rough and crispier. The voice remained as loud as in the vanilla mode; the setting did not affect the loudness much.

The Writing on the Wall, one of the latest offerings of Iron Maiden (the third track from Senjutsu) on YouTube Music sounded richer and the surround effect was felt slightly. But the most noticeable change was in the mids. The mids came out roaring with the Dolby setting, which were a bit feeble without using the Dolby audio (on Standard Mode)

After using the Dolby Audio setting, we strongly suspect you would like to go back to going without it.

For movie watching, a sound level of 75 is quite good if you have a medium-to-big-sized living room. The sound gets fairly loud for a big sized living room at volume levels beyond 60 (out of 100) if you are listening to music.

If you are watching something on USB, like a movie or any other video content, then press the down button on the remote if you wish to change the picture mode, the scale of the video, sound, play progress etc. You can do it right from the window that is playing the film.

However, in case you are watching YouTube content and want to make some changes in the picture or the sound mode, you cannot change the settings from inside a YouTube video. To make changes to the settings, you would have to come out of the window that's playing the content and do it the traditional way, which is cumbersome, to put it mildly.

Xiaomi has been advertising the Patchwall integration with IMDB which would place the IMDB rating of the show or films in the thumbnail before you are about to watch, to give you a better idea about how a particular creative piece has been received by the audience worldwide. It is a nice little addition when it comes to UI.

Verdict

The Mi TV 5X performance is quite satisfying when it comes to the picture and sound output, like when something is playing on it after you have chosen the right settings as per your choice. But it has a lot of ground to cover accessibility wise. The inability to tweak the video and audio settings in YouTube without having to close whatever you are watching jarred on us. Also, the Google Assistant response via YouTube was not the smoothest. Build-wise, the TV has a light frame despite having an all-metal build and it is sort of minimalistic too. Ample port options have been provided at the back to make your TV work with more gadgets. It is a well-rounded product but needs a more flexible UI interface. We would like to see how well Xiaomi works on that for future upgrades.