There is no dearth of affordable large screen TVs anymore. A stark contrast to the pre-pandemic era, when you must have been watchful about spending in upwards of ₹60,000 or so for a 55-inch TV that was worth your time and money. Things have quickly changed, a lot of that driven by competition. That is perhaps why OnePlus had to move to plug a possible gap in their product line-up – a 55-inch TV in the Y1S Pro series, which till now was limited to 43-inch and 50-inch variants.
From the outset, there is very little compromise you’ve to contend with. That’s always a good foundation to build on. You’d not expect anything lesser too, considering the OnePlus TV 55 Y1S Pro demands you part with ₹39,999 of your money. Even more so when the competition landscape includes the Xiaomi Smart TV X-series (the X55 also costs around ₹39,999).
There is a distinct sense that OnePlus, with the wide-ranging series it already has, is largely sticking to a formula that has worked all this while. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
For starters, the LED display panel that OnePlus has used for the 55 Y1S Pro is clearly evolving from the generation that’s already doing its duty for the elder siblings. Therefore, you are in a good place with colours and the larger image processing that’s at play here. To be specific, this display panel supports 10-bit colour depth, which is great news if you want to plug in an Apple TV 4K or an Amazon Fire TV to this (these are examples of media players that offer specific colour depth control).
That said, it is fairly noticeable that at default settings, the display looks a tad softer than what’s ideal, at least in quite a few scenarios such as Live sports. My suggestion is, don’t leave it at that – there are detailed picture settings you can play around with. This, as far as my understanding goes, is also the result for aggressive noise reduction by default. Toggling the multiple noise reduction options to a lower setting, also helps.
Remember how we said “very little compromise” earlier in this article? That is because while the OnePlus TV 55 Y1S Pro supports HDR10, HDR10+ and HLG high dynamic range formats for Ultra HD content, Dolby Atmos is missing. Even more glaring a miss because the Xiaomi X-series does have Dolby Atmos support. Why this is a big enough deal to discuss?
A lot of the Netflix and Disney+ Hotstar Ultra HD content in HDR is encoded with Dolby Atmos. You’ll still get an HDR-esque experience when viewing the Dolby Atmos content on this TV, but it’ll be something akin to ’upscaled’. For a lot of users, lack of Dolby Vision HDR may not matter. In the perfect world, it should.
Visual design is very reminiscent of previous affordable OnePlus TVs, complete with the really thin bezels – at least on three sides of the screen. The table-top stand mechanism is still two-piece, at either end, but the stands themselves now sit at less of an angle. You may find the pulsing stand-by LED (that’s a cool white colour) hard to ignore in a dark room. That could and should have been toned down for gentle luminosity. Apart from that, there are no design elements which get more attention than they should. This TV will sit easy in your living room.
Do not expect a lot to change, as far as the audio side of things is concerned. Most TVs do the bare basics in terms of sound, and at this price, it would be outlandish to expect the OnePlus TV 55 Y1S Pro be capable enough of replicating a soundbar. For instance. It doesn’t. That isn’t to say the audio quality isn’t clear, but lower frequencies are largely sacrificed, leaving you’ll feeling something is distinctly missing during movies. But if noisy news channels or sports are your regular port of call, the job is fairly well done. Depends on what you want to watch.
The OnePlus TV 55 Y1S Pro runs Android TV 10 operating system with Oxygen Play 2.0 as the optional overlay. The latter is all about understanding your viewing habits across streaming apps and generating recommendations for more content you may like. That, and suggestions about what’s new anyway. It is not the default interface to negotiate your way around – that is what I really like about OnePlus’ implementation. It stays out of the way, till you call for it.
Also Read:The versatile OnePlus Monitor X27 misses a ripe chance for a shock price tag
The ecosystem play has been strengthened, for sure. And by that, I mean if you have another OnePlus device. You can use a OnePlus Android phone or watch to control certain functionality of the TV (the former more profound with the well-layered app) and there’s audio pairing with OnePlus wireless earbuds — quite handy if you don’t want the late night football action to keep family members awake.
OnePlus has, and it doesn’t feel like it has been a long while at it, built quite a stable place for itself in the smart TV ecosystem in India. The addition of the OnePlus TV 55 Y1S Pro, adding one more screen size to this series, will simply add to the strong position. A 55-inch screen size, complete with Ultra HD and almost complete HDR support, is incredible value for the sticker price this carries.
Competition is tough from well-known and equally large number of lesser-known brands. Particularly online if you look closely at listings on Amazon and Flipkart. It must have taken extreme restraint for OnePlus to not attempt to stray from the cocktail that has worked well till now.