Roku’s “high-end” Pro series TVs feature Mini LED screens

Roku is entering the high-end TV segment at CES 2024 with its new Pro series, which uses Mini LED backlighting for better brightness and contrast and enhanced audio.The company announced its first homemade TV at CES last year, a surprising move as it has also partnered with companies like TCL over the years to build "Roku TV" Powered by Roku operating system. Roku’s first TV sets, the Select and Plus models, are clearly value-oriented, with prices ranging from $149 to $999. The Pro series includes 55-inch, 65-inch and 75-inch models, with prices starting at $1,500. We expect to see them in Las Vegas next week after CES opens.

call these "Advanced" Of course, TV is relative. You can easily spend thousands on QLED TVs from Samsung, Sony, and LG, and once you opt for an OLED TV, the price will only go higher. Rather than targeting high-end products, Roku is targeting value-oriented shoppers who typically consider TCL’s cheaper TVs. (Roku told us last year that it didn’t plan to compete with partners like TCL, but that seems harder to believe now.)

While Roku’s earlier mid-range Plus TVs included some noteworthy features, such as QLED displays and support for Dolby Vision and Atmos, Mini LED backlighting in the Pro line of TVs would be a significant upgrade. Most mid-range TVs have a small number of local dimming backlight zones, which increase brightness and contrast in specific areas of the screen. Mini LED backlights offer higher brightness, and because they are so small, they can offer hundreds, possibly thousands, of dimming zones.

Currently, Mini LED is the closest thing to OLED functionality – it can turn individual pixels on and off on a standard LED screen to achieve perfect blacks and extremely high contrast.

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In addition to the new TV lineup, Roku also announced that it will use artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop the new Roku Smart Picture feature, which can automatically adjust Roku TVs to specific types of content. The company says most consumers typically don’t adjust their TV settings, which means they may watch content in a suboptimal way. We won’t see Smart Picture come into use until spring 2024, but it could help reduce motion smoothing during movies and increase motion smoothing in motion, since you want footage to look more realistic when you’re in motion. (Of course, image purists can always turn this off.)

Roku says its new Pro series of TVs will be available in the United States in spring 2024. The company will also expand the retail availability of its Select and Plus series of TVs, but we don’t yet know specifics on where they will appear.

We will provide live coverage of CES 2024, which will be held in Las Vegas from January 6th to 12th.Get all the latest news from the show here.

This article was originally published on Engadget: https://www.engadget.com/roku-high-end-pro-series-tvs-feature-mini-led-screens-164354589.html?src=rss

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