Roku Pro Series TV Review: Bright and Easy to Use

When my husband and I swapped out our Vizio OLED for Roku’s Professional Sequence QLED and switched it on, each of us gasped. Even my two kids (7 and 9) had been mesmerized after they turned on Steven Universe. “Why does it look a lot higher now?” my daughter requested.

The distinction between OLED and QLED is palpable (as you can too learn in our How to Buy a TV information). OLED know-how is gorgeous, however it lends itself to really black blacks; it’s finest when you’re watching films or gaming in an optimized, darkish, home-theater-like atmosphere. A QLED is simply … brighter. That makes an enormous distinction once you’re 7 and 9, watching cartoons whereas leaping on the sofa and ready for dinner, or once you’re a mother who’s making an attempt to catch a little bit of the Copa America video games on the sofa together with her canine whereas working.

That is the primary of Roku’s in-house-made TVs (Roku TVs made earlier than final yr had been made by different corporations, simply with a Roku mind). My colleague Parker Corridor examined the entry-level Roku TV, the Plus Sequence, and was very impressed. For a month now, my household and I’ve been testing the upgraded Roku Professional Sequence and have additionally been thrilled.

Consumer Pleasant

Specs and efficiency apart, one of many major causes you purchase a Roku anything is due to how straightforward it’s to make use of. I actually appreciated my Vizio OLED and simply accepted that each time I turned it on, I might should spend 5 minutes sorting by way of the Vizio Good interface and fidgeting with cables if I wished to play on my gaming PC.

It was with a deep sigh of reduction that I plugged in my Sonos soundbar, PS5, and gaming PC into the Roku TV and watched the whole lot simply … present up within the Roku interface. (It has two HDMI 2.1 ports, HDMI eARC, USB-A, USB-C, and cable inputs.)

Though you can mount it, I simply positioned it on our console desk with the 2 included ft and it match simply. Including all of your apps—Netflix, Disney+, Fubo—takes about so long as clicking on the Add Channels button and signing in in your pc, which is principally zero time until you’ve forgotten your login data.

Having an easy-to-navigate interface additionally makes it a lot simpler to determine different issues to observe. Vizio’s interface was so cluttered that my children usually simply went straight to Steven Universe. On Roku’s, the CuriosityStream and PBS Children tiles are really easy to search out that they ended up watching extra academic content material simply out of, effectively, curiosity. That was an sudden present in summer season, when all of the neighborhood children simply find yourself watching TV at our home within the air-conditioning.