Smart TVs, the new favorite product segment of smart hardware manufacturers, are reshaping our imagination of home entertainment. If you’re satisfied with your old TV in your living room and haven’t noticed the evolution of smart TV over the years, this review probably will ignite your interest in it.
Today, we are going to look deeper into one of the hottest Smart TV series in the market, the HUAWEI Vision S smart TV. In this review, we’ll show you how the latest Huawei TV can upgrade your home entertainment experience.
The model we have today is the HUAWEI Vision S65, which comes with an attractive visual presentation and great distributed capabilities for interaction with phones, along with a competitive price. The Vision S series is the first Huawei Smart TV series for the international market, so it is probably the best Huawei Smart TV you can buy at the moment.
HUAWEI Vision S65 Smart TV Review: Design
Let’s look at its design. At first glance, the top camera immediately grabbed our attention. This 13MP camera is designed with a magnetic link and supports up and down rotation. Users can adjust the camera angle for the best shooting position. And thanks to the convenient magnetic design, the camera is removable at any time when it’s not in use, so there is no fear of privacy leaks. In addition to normal photo taking and video filming, the camera also can make 1080P video calls with other devices.
The bezel is made of one-piece plastic without break points. And the backside is made of metal, which we guess is for a better thermal design.
Huawei Smart Screen S65 features a 4K 120Hz LCD screen. This screen achieves a super-high screen-to-body ratio of 94%. The front side is visually stunning. In addition, in order to weaken the presence of other components, so that users can focus on the screen itself, the base is designed into two visually lightweight bars. Of course, you can also choose to wall-mount it and make it a part of your wall decor.
HUAWEI Vision S65 Smart TV Review: Display
Coming back to the display, it supports a DCI-P3 Gamut of up to 92%, which already covers wider colors than most TV products in its price range. In addition, the Vision S also provides multi-color modes. And then we watched various content including TV Shows, movies and sports. The Auto Mode can adapt to different content pretty well, which is quite convenient if you don’t want to change the color mode from time to time.
However, the Vision S didn’t support HDR colors, so when displaying HDR contents, the dynamic range could be a bit
The 120Hz refresh rate really looks stunning. But the viewing experience wouldn’t have been so delightful when watching low-framerate content if not for the supporting Smart MEMC algorithm. Combined with HUAWEI’s MEMC algorithm, it can dynamically insert frames up to 120fps and take full advantage of the 120Hz screen.
And the fact is that most video content that we can watch right now generally are made with relatively low framerates of 24fps or 30fps. But unlike most TV products featuring 60Hz refresh-rate, the Vision S series’ 120Hz refresh rate is an integer multiple of both 30 and 24, which guarantees insertion of consistent frames between every 2 frames. As a result, the Vision S is able to better solve the problems of lag, ghosting, and trailing that exist on 60Hz screens, thereby making the picture smoother and more stable with the double frame rates.
During our experience, the MEMC technique of the Vision S worked well with most content. But we have to remind you that the MEMC technology is not perfect for all the TV products so far. The Vision S is no exception. When it meets complicated or rapidly changing clips, the MEMC may not perfectly work. And after we tested, under the Auto Mode or the Customized mode with Middle level of dynamic picture compensation, the MEMC performed much better to adapt to any content with good picture quality, and smooth motion as well.
HUAWEI Vision S65 Smart TV Review: Connectivity Ports
As for its wired connection, there are 3 HDMI 2.0 ports, one AV-in, a SPDIF Audio out and a USB-3 for file transfer or external storage. Although the screen of the TV supports up to 4K resolution and 120Hz, there is no way to play 4K 120Hz games with the Vision S due to the lack of HDMI 2.1 ports.
So, for wired projection with non-Huawei-devices, such as Gaming consoles and PCs, although the Vision S features a 4k 120Hz screen, so far it can only support up to 4K resolution with 30fps refresh rate or 1080P resolution with 60fps, which is quite a waste of such a great display.
But thanks to the MEMC feature, the gaming experience still got improved with the dynamic compensation. In actual gaming, the huge display made the whole experience much more immersive than just playing games on a PC display, and it didn’t lose much of the smoothness either.
HUAWEI Vision S65 Smart TV Review: Speakers
Another surprise of the vision S is the decent AI speaker mode powered by the built-in 4 speakers. The Vision S uses a 4 x 10W-speaker solution, including two full-range speakers and another two high-range speakers. Because of the use of three-band playback, the Vision S can deliver an extremely wide frequency response range, enabling perfect reproduction of different frequencies in the audio signal.
HUAWEI Vision S65 Smart TV Review: HarmonyOS
When it comes to the Vision series, it’s inevitable to talk about the Harmony OS. Huawei Vision series is one of the first hardware to be built on Harmony OS, from which we can also get a glimpse of the future that will be built under the HUAWEI Smart home project. As the essential feature of HUAWEI’s multi-hardware collaborative operation, the Harmony OS pursues the integration and unification of multiple devices. For example, the Vision S can be an important extension of your phone, and similarly, your phone can be used as an accessory to the Vision TV. You can turn the phone not just into a remote control for the Vision TV, but it can also be a low-latency projection signal of it, and can even be the gamepad when you play games on the Vision TV. It can call on the phone’s various sensors to perform operations that are not possible with other gamepads, such as the phone’s gyroscope and gravity sensor. And of course, all these features are only available on Huawei’s phones right now.
Besides, for convenient projection, the Vision S supports the OneHop projection under 60fps high framerate. Using the OneHop, users can have their Huawei phone’s screen instantly mirrored to the TV through a single contact between the phone and the remote control. Under mirrored projection, the status bar, notifications and message or call alerts would be blocked and will not be displayed on the TV screen, which protects users’ privacy.
And it does not just simply mirror your phone but the TV also can project the phone under desktop mode and turn it into a PC. And then the phone will become a touchpad to control the PC.
Besides, the excellent interaction with Huawei devices also includes fast file, video and image transfer and share.
Another important addition we found is that Huawei has customized different content including online video, music and Apps according to different regions. If you officially purchase the TV in your region, the TV system will show the customized popular local content, along with popular international content as well.
HUAWEI Vision S65 Smart TV Review: Verdict
From the Vision S, it’s quite surprising that Huawei has the real determination to be a global player in the smart connected TV segment, and more importantly, it’s done pretty well: Such as the 4K resolution and 120Hz refresh rate with MEMC dynamic compensation; the removable camera, the multi-device collaboration based on the fluent Harmony OS and the customized contents for various regions. Some of these features are rare even in most competing products in the same price range. And if you’re a Huawei phone user, the Vision series could be the best option for you.
Currently, Huawei is working on updating its phone operating system to the Harmony OS. And when the update comes, we believe that the experience on the Vision TV will definitely be better than the present.
