Amazon Ember 2-Series with Fire TV Review

Design

• Quick to set up
• Trim looks
• Not the best viewing angles

There’s not too much to say about the design of the Ember 2-Series, which is no bad thing. It looks anonymous – aside from the Fire TV badge, you might not know it was an Amazon TV.

But don’t take that to mean it feels cheap because it doesn’t. There’s no style, but this is a TV that’s more function than form. The bezels are surprisingly thin, ensuring what you’re seeing is mostly screen – the rear panel juts out to about 80mm without the stand but it doesn’t seem likely (to me at least) that this TV will be a contender for wall-mounting.

The screen I have in for testing is the 40-inch, but there is a smaller size in a 32-inch option.

Attaching the feet took less than 90 seconds, so it’s easy and practical to get it up and running. Viewing angles only extend to the edges of the screen – viewed from a wider angle and contrast, colour, brightness drop off. It’s also quite a reflective screen.

Gaming

• No Game mode
• High input
• Luna cloud streaming

In recent years smaller-sized screens have become a decent substitute to gaming monitors, but the Ember 2-Series is not a TV set up for gaming.

Amazon’s Luna cloud streaming service is supported through Fire TV but this model doesn’t appear to have a game mode. I’ve searched high and low, far and wide and found nothing. Input lag at 60Hz in the TV’s Standard mode registered at 80.3ms, which isn’t great even for casual games.

Plugging in a PS5 cemented the view that this isn’t a gaming screen. It’s not the sharpest or brightest image, at times looking a bit smeary, playing Gran Turismo 7 and the final nail in its gaming coffin is that it’s not the most responsive.

User Experience

• 2026 Fire TV interface
• Alexa

When Amazon first revamped its Fire TV interface, I felt it improved over the previous version. But over the course of time, it succumbed to putting lots of choices at the viewer’s fingertips without organising it very well.

The Fire TV interface received a refresh and that update has been rolled out to the Ember 4-Series and 2-Series models.

It’s an improvement in some ways but very much the same in others. There’s still too much content that Fire TV puts in front of you for my liking. The 90s/alt-rock rail had around 79 titles, the ‘Featured/Exclusive’ rail had 100, the ‘Recently Added TV’ also had 100 titles. The number of rails on the home screen is as many as 50.

This makes Fire TV feel impersonal, as if it doesn’t really matter what you watch, you’ll still be shovelled a lot of films and TV series to watch without it knowing what you like. If I’m the type of person who wants to find something to watch fairly quickly, this interface feels like ‘Paradox of Choice’. It could do with being more focused and less comprehensive in the number of titles it sends your way.

The interface is, at least, better organised; divided into sections at the top (Home, Films, TV, Live, Sport); with a football section that’s currently a hub for the World Cup (expect this to adapt down the line with other tournaments).

There’s now a sidebar you can access that contains your watchlist (My Stuff), Smart Home, Ambient mode, Inputs, Appstore and more. Time will tell whether this new smart interface feng shui is helpful, but it does feel neater, visually better and more expansive in terms of finding out the breadth and depth that Fire TV has to offer. But it could still be more personalised, I feel.

Accessing the ‘Settings’ requires a pin (not helpful if you’ve forgotten it), and can become an annoyance if you find yourself in the settings a lot. There seems to be a timer around the pin security, so if you come back to the settings after a few minutes, you’ll have to re-enter the pin again. Not particularly convenient.

That said, for all the content that Fire TV is home to, scrolling through the various rows is quick and responsive without much lag (if you do have lag, make sure the remote is paired). If manual scrolling is too tiresome, there’s Alexa and she’s quick to respond in most cases, getting you where you want promptly.

In fact, she’s very speedy – a search for sports films and it appeared quickly. That said, she has struggled. I asked her to find the MUBI app and she didn’t understand my request, bringing up YouTube, Internet and Amazon Music apps to search within them. Other times she thought I was saying ‘movie’ rather than MUBI.

Fire TV has you covered for apps – all the big global and UK-specific apps are provided, and the latter also come within the Freely umbrella which provides an EPG to keep track of what’s showing. There’s a Freely button on the Alexa remote for quick access, along with Netflix, Disney+ and Prime Video (naturally). You’re never starved of content with Fire TV and its methods of curation – I personally just find it overwhelming just how much there is.

You can create up to six profiles, including profiles for children. You can share profiles on Fire TV and Prime Video, allowing to share benefits on a specific profile

The Ember 2-Series supports the Ambient Experience as well. Whenever the TV is idle, it turns the screen into a ‘smart display’ where you can have backgrounds displayed such as photos or artwork, have weather info displayed as well as listen to music while it cycles through images.

When you walk in front of the TV, it senses your presence and returns to the home screen, and I found it did more consistently in ‘knowing’ you were there than the Ember 4-Series did. It makes this a bit more of a ‘lifestyle’ TV than most at this price point.

Features

• HDMI eARC
• Full HD resolution
• HDR support

The Amazon Ember 2-Series only supports Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080) and the 32-inch model only gets as far as 720p. There is HDR support with HDR10 and HLG but it doesn’t seem all apps have HDR.

Netflix and Disney+ support HDR10. BBC iPlayer doesn’t appear to have any HLG support, while with Prime Video, when I go into the settings, TV series and films seem to be in SDR.

There are two HDMI inputs, one covers HDMI eARC though there’s no Dolby Atmos immersive audio support for this model, you do get Dolby Digital+ (lossy, lower quality version).

A USB, Ethernet and digital optical output covers the rest of the connection options, while there’s Wi-Fi 6 for a speedy Internet connection. There’s Matter casting and AirPlay 2 streaming with iOS devices.

Picture Quality

• Not the sharpest image
• Bright SDR performance
• Dim HDR quality

Though Amazon describes the Ember 2-Series as having “crisp and clear HD quality”, in reality it doesn’t benefit from the sharpest image quality. There’s a softness and smoothness to the image, along with a little bit of grainy noise to the image. There’s also some blurring as characters move their heads.

This isn’t really a shock – these issues seem to plague less expensive screens, but it’s worth bearing in mind that this is a 1080p. I’d have liked higher levels of sharpness, but that can introduce its own problems by making the image look artificial.

Detail is decent, at least with faces and objects in the foreground, black levels look solid throughout the last season of The Boys, and the TV does look decently bright and attempts some decent contrast with SDR content (it never gets past 350 nits of brightness anyway). Movie Bright mode offers the best balance, while Standard looks bright (enough) with punchier skintones.

Colours and tones look good, though it’s worth caveating that in the Prime Video app, this appears to be in SDR and not HDR.

Switching to the latest season of One Piece on Netflix, which does seem to be in HDR, and colours look decent but they’re not the punchiest or the brightest. It’s again not the sharpest or the most detailed, and contrast seems lacking with HDR content with black levels that lack depth and detail. Whenever there’s a dark scene (like the scene early in the season where the Straw Hat crew are stuck in a whale), you’re only seeing partial amounts of what’s actually there.

Skintones can be slightly pink-ish and cold in appearance, and there’s a blu-ish tone to blacks which implies some backlight bleeding – a bit of a surprise for a TV with such low brightness. Some discolouration doesn’t help either with green hues to the blue tones on the sea when the whale (Laboon) is underwater. I’d recommend turning all the clarity features off, they don’t do anything to improve the image.

A Blu-ray of Tron: Legacy again shows that the Ember 2-Series isn’t the sharpest TV on the block, with an image that can be slightly noisy and hazy, as if the TV is introducing these issues. Edges are slightly jaded, and there’s again some blurriness with motion. The lack of sharpness and the presence of soft levels of detail with native 1080p content is a bit of a disappointment.

Upscaling

• Not the sharpest performance

The same issues that affected the Ember 4-Series in upscaling are present with the Ember 2-Series.

A DVD of Spider-Man 3 looks soft, but colours look good and in that regard it’s an attractive-looking image. It lacks clarity and detail, and that’s par for the course considering it’s a DVD but I’d have hoped that the screen size of 40-inches won’t have shown up the lack of detail as much. Colour is the main priority and in that regard, the Ember 2-Series makes the film look pretty good.

Edges aren’t too jagged and there’s some noise present, but it does look like a slightly better presentation of a DVD. The disappointment is that it’s only slightly better. It does feel that upscaling with Amazon TVs could be better, and that’s felt the case for some time now.

Sound Quality

• Good with dialogue
• Poor with bass

I would normally expect audio quality from a cheap TV to be on the inferior side, but the Ember 2-Series is not too shabby.

It offers good levels of clarity with dialogue to the point where they sound natural. The soundstage spreads from one edge of the screen to the other, and dialogue is placed in the right places.

Detail levels are decent, so it doesn’t come across as detail poor or muddy. There’s a dynamism in terms of jumping from quiet and loud that gives soundtracks a jolt of energy.

It struggles with bass and it’s not balanced with highs either. The sound modes don’t really help – I can’t tell the difference between Standard and Film, while the Smart mode seems to lack detail (avoid). Clear Voice does nothing that I can hear, while Enhance Bass slightly beefs up the low end – and I do mean slightly.

You’ll want a soundbar, and there’s a few in our best cheap soundbar to take a look at.

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Should you buy it?