Xiaomi X50 4K LED TV review

Being a 4K LED panel, it makes use of Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG to handle any high dynamic range content that comes its way. Not much is known about what the Vivid Picture Engine really does, but it is Xiaomi trying to get the best colours from the incoming signal. For the most part, we didn't feel the need to tweak the picture too much, but it does take over some of the duties of Dolby Vision content. Of course, you can override the defaults and generally, we found ourselves switching the colour temperature back to Standard from the Warm setting it sets on its own. Motion processing is best left off, along with sharpness at 0 and even with just these two settings, the picture straight out of the box was quite enticing.

A strange quirk we discovered was that while making any picture setting changes on Amazon Prime Video, pressing the back button just exited the app and dropped you back on the home menu. This seems to be an easy bug fix during a routine update though. Xiaomi has been relentlessly working on improving its Patchwall interface and the X50 comes one step closer to the eternal family conundrum, "what should we watch?". It consolidates all the relevant content from over 25 apps and categorises them in fields that are easy to search and relate to. So you can choose from BBC Shows or Nat Geo documentaries, IMDB top-rated movies and even show content relevant to an age group!

On darker scenes, the X50 will show its lack of perfect contrast and backlighting zones, but for the vast majority of your viewing time, it delivers punchy colours with enough sharpness and detail to make 4K HDR content addictive. House of Dragons is a particularly difficult piece of material to handle for any display and while the X50 struggled to dig out shadow detail from the darkest parts of a scene, it managed to preserve the natural skin tones and textures of the intricate costumes without oversharpening. What is even more impressive at its price point is the sound quality. It doesn't pretend to have any bass, but the suite of DTS sound enhancements adds some weight and the Virtualizer makes it sound much larger too. It's a clean, distortion-free sound and goes plenty loud.

With a remote control that is meant to be as easy as possible to use and a birds-eye view of all the content you can consume, the X50 is a great budget TV. Throw in HDMI eARC connectivity for gamers and you have it all!