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Our ONN 50-inch 4K TV review is an excellent way to examine the upsides and drawbacks of Walmart’s private-label displays. We use the review to find out if the attractive pricing of ONN televisions is one of many impressive qualities of these displays.
Content Breakdown
ONN 50-inch 4K TV review: What you’re looking for in a TV
Different shoppers prioritize different things in their search for the ideal TV. As such, each shopper should make a checklist that doubles as a ranking of must-have features. The shopper should also have a list of deal breakers that disqualify a prospective purchase.
Budget TV sets from BestBuy or Walmart are geared towards shoppers looking for unbeatable prices. This is the type of shopper who wants maximum bang for their hard-earned buck. The person looking to buy an ONN TV may also want features like:
- Decent selection of input/output ports
- A smart TV interface with plenty of streaming apps and useful tools
- High resolution
- Overall, the TV should have good image quality and motion handling
Does the 50-inch ONN 4-series deliver on some or all of the items in this checklist? Unboxing the TV seems like a good place to start our quest for answers.
Design and build
The 50-inch ONN 4-series sits in a slim plastic cabinet with even slimmer bezels. This lightweight TV has a curved side profile with a small portion sticking out at the bottom of the panel. The extension houses some of the panel’s internal hardware, including a pair of 10-watt speakers.
At its thickest, the ONN 4-series panel is 2.4 inches deep, which is compact enough for a wall-mount setup. You’ll need a mounting bracket that’s compatible with the 200×200 VESA pattern on the back panel. Alternatively, you can place the TV on a surface that’s at least as long as the TV. The furniture you choose should be big enough to accommodate the 45”x11” footprint of the TV feet. It bears mentioning that the TV feet are a little shaky, so a wall-mount install is your best bet.
You’ll find two sets of ports at the back of the 50-inch ONN Roku TV. One set of ports is downward-facing and connecting them requires a little contortion and some tactile skills. Unfortunately, all three HDMI ports sit among these hard-to-reach connectors. The second set of ports is side-facing, which makes the connectors easier to access.
Ports and connectivity
For a budget TV, the 50-inch ONN 4K display has enough ports to handle multiple external devices at the same time. Here’s the selection of input/output ports you should expect with the 50-inch ONN Roku TV:
- Three HDMI Ports
- A Digital optical output
- One USB port
- An Ethernet port
- An RF connector
The panel has a wireless adapter that takes care of WiFi connectivity, but you’ll have to do it without Bluetooth. This means that you’ll need to take extra steps to connect your wireless headphones and hearing aid.
First, you would need to install the Roku companion app on your phone or tablet. Next, you pair your Bluetooth headphones with your device. From the app, you can launch the ‘private listening’ feature to direct audio from the TV, through the app, and to your Bluetooth headphones or hearing aid. This is just one of many perks of using the Roku companion app with the 50-inch ONN 4-series.
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ONN 50-inch 4K TV review: Roku and smart features
In a world of smart TV platforms full of intrusive ads and bloatware, Roku OS remains a breath of fresh air. The Roku UI is intuitive and a quick glance is all it takes to find whatever app or menu you’re looking for. Roku also offers thousands of free channels and hundreds of the most popular streaming apps in the market.
What’s missing from the ONN 4-series is an interface that connects to compatible smart home devices. This omission comes down to the absence of tools like Alexa and Google Assistant. Still, the Roku interface has plenty to offer in terms of speed, content, and ease of use. The lack of smart home features seems like a small price to pay, given the low price of this TV.
ONN 50-inch 4K TV review: Hardware and performance
The ONN Roku TV is a 60Hz panel with 4K resolution and direct backlighting. This 50-inch TV lacks local dimming, which limits its ability to deliver precise contrast. Still, the panel makes a valiant effort to bring out small details, with mixed results.
A 50-inch 4K panel has a good concentration of pixels per inch; a quality that contributes to rich and vivid colors. Now all the ONN 4-series has to do is have a decent color gamut to paint those pixels. On this count, the ONN Roku TV does a passable job by covering 97 percent of the sRGB color space. For reference, most TV sets with comparable specs cover 99 percent of these most basic color spaces. It then follows that the ONN panel covers a limited percentage of the kinds of color spaces that the film industry uses.
Color, contrast, highlights, and detail
An adequate color gamut gives the ONN panel enough material to paint believable, life-like images. There’s a decent amount of color nuance in bright scenes, but darker scenes have less definition. A lack of precision dimming and middling native contrast obscures some of the finer details of an image. This limitation becomes more evident in fast-moving content.
A brighter TV would reduce some of these limitations, by increasing the panel’s native contrast and color volume. However, we have to remember that the 50-inch ONN 4-series typically costs less than $250. This means that shoppers have to make a tradeoff between super-low pricing and flagship performance. It bears mentioning that the overall image quality of the ONN panel is pretty decent.
Uniformity and viewing angles
The wide viewing angle of the ONN 4-series allows you to host a group of people for movie nights or sporting events. You don’t even have to do geometry calculations to ensure that everybody gets a good sitting spot. Every one of your guests will have the best seat in the house.
Better still, the ONN panel has an even screen with little clouding and light bleed-through. You don’t have to worry about light bleedthrough during dark scenes or brown patches during fast-action sports content.
Motion handling
This is a mixed back of a slow response time and impressively low input lag. The overall result is slight motion blur and a screen that’s responsive enough for casual gaming.
Pros
- Super affordable
- Slim side-profile
- All the content and smart features that Roku has to offer
- Decent picture quality
- Good viewing angles
Cons
- Pairing the TV with a different remote takes some effort
- Some customer reviews report different kinds of glitches, from a shaky WiFi connection to audio lag
- The ONN 4-series lacks Bluetooth
- TV feet are less solid than we’d like
- The build quality could be more solid and ONN really should invest in better quality control
ONN 50-inch 4K TV review verdict: A 50-inch Roku TV that’s easy on the eyes and gentle on the wallet
For a budget TV, the 50-inch ONN 4-series boasts excellent smart TV features and good performance. If you need a decent, functional TV on short notice, then you should consider the ONN Roku TV. If you need a 4K smart TV on a budget, then then you should consider the ONN Roku TV.
This ONN 50-inch 4K TV review finds that the tradeoffs you would make with this budget TV are worth it in the short term. However, you would need to find an alternative if you’re looking for a TV that delivers long years of service and peerless picture quality. This is the main tradeoff you need to weigh when looking for a budget TV. Click here to learn more about this television.
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