Xiaomi S Mini LED 65-inch TV review: A big and bright screen you must consider (HT Tech)

Mini LED TVs give you the best of both worlds – excellent contrast, deeper blacks and high peak brightness at a price tag that doesn’t burn an OLED-sized hole in your pocket. That’s exactly the class of TVs and the type of users that Xiaomi is targeting with its latest Xiaomi S Mini LED TV series. This premium TV series promises to deliver deeper blacks, sharper details and a sustained performance. On paper, the specs look good and the promise sounds genuine. Yet the question remains: does the Xiaomi S Mini LED TV series deliver what it promises or is it another fancy-looking TV with great features? We’ll try to answer that and more in the detailed review below. So, keep reading. But before that, let’s take a quick look at its key specifications.

Size aside, the Xiaomi S Mini LED 65-inch TV comes with a metal body with a bezel-less design and ‘Mini LED’ branding’ at the bottom right corner. This design feels more premium than the gigantic TVs with plastic frames. It also gives this TV more stability when placed on a table or a cabinet using its stand. But if you don’t like that, you can always mount it on a wall for a cleaner look.

Apart from its minimalistic look, this TV gets ample connectivity options including multiple USB ports and three HDMI ports. The list also includes an HDMI eARC port, which is needed for sending high-quality uncompressed audio from your TV to a soundbar more efficiently. More on the sound part later. You also get support for Airplay 2, Google Cast and Miracast, which makes connectivity easier.

I went back to watching WandaVision and The Batman just to get a feel of how efficient this TV is in handling scenarios where the bright and dark elements co-exist in the same scene and how well it differentiates between different shades of grey (and even red in case of WandaVision) and I was genuinely impressed with the output. The bright areas stood out and darker areas retained depth. Overall, the visuals looked balanced. Sure, the blacks or the darker areas don’t give you OLED-level depth but they come close.

Beyond the vibrant colours and deeper black, this TV supports HDR10+ with Dolby Vision, which is where the magic really happens. Xiaomi claims that this TV touches 1,200 nits of peak brightness. The performance in real life scenarios, however, varies with ambient brightness. That said, this TV gets incredibly bright. Even when there is bright ambient lighting in the room, the colours feel sharp and punchy, more so in the Vivid picture mode, without being overwhelming. I watched a bunch of movies and TV series like Dhurandhar and Emily in Paris (you can judge me later!) and the visual performance felt bright, vibrant yet controlled.

That said, not everything is rosy and red as the viewing angles are far from perfect. This gives the best viewing experience when you are sitting right in front of it. You move far towards the sides and the viewing experience, especially the contrast, begins to lose its punch. Apart from this, Xiaomi’s S Mini LED 65-inch TV gets 512 dimming zones, which is a backlighting technology that divides the screen into 512 zones that lets the TV to brighten specific areas while turning off the lights in other areas to offer better contrast and deeper blacks. This also helps the TV achieve high brightness and reduce the halo effect, which is the situation when the light bleeds from a bright area to the surrounding darker area on the screen. For most parts, the halo effect is controlled but I did notice some blooming occasionally.

Beyond this, the Xiaomi S Mini LED 65-inch TV gets a 60Hz display. But the software uses a combination of Auto Low Latency Mode (ALLM) and DLG, which temporarily doubles the screen refresh rate, to make the screen feel smoother during gaming.

So does that mean it can replace your soundbar? No, it can’t. But for most parts you won’t need a soundbar as the sound is loud, balanced and enough to fill a large living room. But if you are an audio buff and you’re looking for a specific sound quality and high clarity, a soundbar will definitely enhance the overall audio-visual dynamics.

Coming back to the interface, the home space has a dedicated tab that gives you access to PatchWall’s interface and Xiaomi TV+, which in turn brings direct access to a bunch of OTT apps and hundreds of live TV channels including news channels, regional channels and even entertainment channels. Google TV is incredibly intuitive and user friendly and Xiaomi has also made it easy for the users to navigate across interfaces easily, making the entire experience smooth and seamless. Beyond these features, this TV gets support for Apple’s AirPlay 2, Google Cast and Miracast. I frequently used AirPlay to cast my entire playlist onto this TV and it didn’t fail me even once. Suffice to say that it aces connectivity too.

Coming to the internals, this TV is powered by the quad-core A55 processor that is coupled with Mali-G52 GPU. Under the hood, you also get 2GB of RAM and 32GB of storage space. While that looks good on paper, the entire setup can feel a bit sluggish at times. I noticed the difference particularly while switching apps and accessing various channels on the Xiaomi TV+. But for most parts, you won’t feel much of a difference.

– Strong HDR performance

– Decent speaker setup

– Value for money in its price segment

– Can feel sluggish at times

Disclaimer: At Hindustan Times, we help you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and products. Hindustan Times has an affiliate partnership, so we may get a part of the revenue when you make a purchase. We shall not be liable for any claim under applicable laws, including but not limited to the Consumer Protection Act, 2019, with respect to the products. The products listed in this article are in no particular order of priority.