LeEco Super3 X55 4K TV – Live in your Living room – Review

There are many options in market when it comes to Smart TV. In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a non-Smart TV. The demand for TVs in the market has been steady for over 25 years now. Considering these two data points, Chinese manufacturers, who have been in the background so far, have started playing directly in the market. Chinese industry has been the manufacturing hub for many brands till date. But they have not entering into the market directly. Last month, TCL made its mark in Indian soil with a wide array of Smart TVs and mobile phones. Xiaomi has been trying to bring in their Mi TV for quite sometime now, without any success. But once again, LeEco has made a bold step and launched their line up of Smart TVs in India. LeTV has re-branded themselves as LeEco in certain markets outside China.

One fine day, as I walked into my home, I was surprised to see a huge box waiting in the lobby. LeEco had sent across their Super3 X55 4K TV for review. So lets check out this new rock star in town and see if it is worth the price.

In the Box

The TV and the stand comes in two separate boxes. The TV package is huge and has a double carton box protection. Removing the carton packages, you would find the Super3 X55 4K TV protected by thermocoal padding. You would also find a smaller box with Smart Remote, batteries, quick guide, 3 in 1 adapting cable and wall mounting sleeves. Check out my unboxing video.

Installation and Setup

Installing the TV on the living room was simple job. The TV has to be fixed on the stand and tightened with screws to keep it in place steadily. After positioning it on the cabinet, the cables have to be connected. I connected the 3 HDMI ports with my HD Set-top box, chromecast and Android TV box. The RCA composite port was used to connect my DVD player. I connected my Edifier speakers with the optical port. Finally, the power cable was connected and the TV was installed in under 30 minutes.

After the TV was powered on for the first time, you would have to go through the setup process. You will have to connect the TV with your WiFi network and log in with your LeEco membership. This can be done later as well. But I chose to get it done while setting it up. The installation and setup process was simple and straight forward. I did it all myself and never faced any hiccups during the process.

Design

I had a 21 inch CRT TV and 3 years ago, I upgraded myself to a Panasonic Vierra 42 inch Full HD TV. My 42 inch TV was pretty light weight and can be managed easily while carrying or shifting. But the Super3 X55 4K TV is a heavyweight champion. It weighs about 24 kg and the stand is the key to its stability. The stand has a unique design. It is asymmetric curve and liking the design depends on your personal choice. I prefer symmetric arrangement and my TV cabinet had a symmetric design and this stand did not go well with it. The TV frame and panel has a minimum thickness of 15.5 mm and a max of 46 mm. The bezels are thin and has grey metal finish. The finishing is of world-class quality and it screams for attention from any angle.

The front has a LeTV back-lit branding along with the IR sensor port. At the top, you would find a USB 3.0 port. It is a suitable location for the camera. At the back, all the ports are placed on the right side. The power port is on the left. Half the ports are easily accessible, while the rest are very difficult to access. So it is recommended to plug-in all the permanent connections from the bottom side, while the frequently accessed connections can go in from the right side. This is very sensible usability thinking. Overall, this is truly impressive design and build quality from LeTV (LeEco).

Smart Remote

The Smart Remote that is bundled along is very minimalist. It has only the bare essential controls. Most of the controls are through the 4 way navigation button. I wanted to pair it with my universal remote, but it would be a laborious job to unpair and pair with my regular TV in a week’s time. So I didn’t sweat. Also the smart remote has voice recognition function, when is defunct in India, as it recognizes only Chinese language. The LE button brings an overlay of quick actions. You can have any shortcut here. I liked the screenshot option on it. In my time with the TV, my kids dropped the remote a few times and it shows no sign of it. So the remote has good quality construction and the buttons have good mechanical feedback. However, it would have been better if the keys were back-lit.

The Remote app on my Le Max 2 paired up easily with the Super TV and it worked like a charm.

Connectivity

The Super3 X55 4K TV is a beast when it comes to connectivity. Here are a list of ports. It has 2 USB 3.0 ports, 1 USB 2.0 port, 3 HDMI 2.0 ports, SD card slot, yPbPr port, RCA component, VGA port, 3.5 mm audio port, RF input, Ethernet port, PC line in and an optical audio port. The HDMI ports are spread evenly. There are two ports on this side and one of them supports ARC (Audio Return Channel). The single HDMI port on the bottom supports MHL 2.0 for connecting with mobile devices. On the wireless connectivity, it has Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0.

Here are the devices I had connected to the X55 for testing. 32 GB SD card, 32 GB Pendrive, Blue tooth receiver for Logitech remote, Tata Sky HD set-top box, Philips DVD player, Chromecast, Android MXII Midnight TV box, Edifier 2.1 speakers and my home wifi connection via Linksys EA4500 router on a 50 mbps connection. I also connected a 2 TB and 1 TB external drives and was able to access movies and music content from them without any issues. Every single of the above mentioned, worked without any issues.

Picture quality

Now here is the portion, which really matters; The picture quality. The X55 is a 4K TV and the panel has 60 Hertz refresh rate. The display panel is manufactured by LG. The picture quality on this display is stunning. Obviously you would be tempted to compare it with Samsung and Sony. So I paid a visit to the nearest TV showroom to check out the other 4K TVs in the market. To my surprise, 55 inch 4K TVs were rare to find the market. I finally found a showroom which had Samsung 55JU6470 and Sony Bravia KD-55X9300C on display. Though the price of these two models are way too high compared with LeTV X55, I tried to fathom the experience you would get for the price difference.

The Samsung TV had very bright colors and high saturation levels. The demo content was good, but when watching 300 and Avatar, I realized that the colors were artificially pumped up. On the other hand the Sony TV has superior color reproduction and the capabilities of Bravia engine warrants no further explanation. The Samsung TV would cost double the cost of Le X55 and it is not worth it, while the Sony TV would cost 4 times the cost of Le X55 and so is the picture quality.

There are other brands in the market with their 55 inch 4K TVs like the TCL, Videocon and Vu, but I was unable to get my eyes on them. Coming back to our star of this post, the X3-55 has a superior picture processing engine. The 4K upscaling process was good and I noticed that it was able to upscale my TV’s SD content to a better quality, if not true 4K. HD and Full HD upscaling was much better than SD content. There are a few picture mode presets available and you set a custom mode as well.

The display had fantastic black levels. Black levels are an important measure of picture quality. On the X3-55, black color reproduction was true black and that resulted in a pleasant viewing experience. Also brightness and contrast levels were good. I would recommend a minimum of 9 feet viewing distance on a 55 inch 4K TV, though the official recommendation is 7.5 ft. The 60 Hz frame refresh rate was good enough for 4K movie watching experience. A higher refresh rate would matter only for the serious gamers and they can check out the Super3 Max65 model.

The panel gives wide viewing angles and it has matte finish to avoid any stray light reflection. In total, the picture quality on the LeTV Super3 X55 4K TV is truly amazing and definitely worth the price tag.

Audio quality

Manufactures must stop including speakers with TV. A thin form factor does not give much freedom to include high quality speakers along with the TV. Sony Bravia has sacrificed the thin bezels and have gone for dedicated speaker modules on their KD-55X9300C model. But other LED TVs suffer from inferior speakers. Among all those, the X3-55 stands tall with its 20W speaker system. The speaker system can be switched to Dolby or DTS mode from the settings. It is definitely louder than the ones available in the market. It does have a few audio preset, but it lacks custom equalizer settings. The quality of sound does not do enough justice to the quality of picture. You would definitely need to invest in a set of external speakers or sound bar.

UI and Performance

The X3-55 is running on heavily forked Android OS. It has EUI 5.8 running on top of Android 5.0. The UI offers 3 main sections or home screens. On the Input screen, you would be able to watch all of your digital and analog media content, connected via the ports. On the Live screen, you would be able to watch over 100 TV channels via internet. On the Apps screen, you would find all the apps installed on the system. It includes the Levidi app, to watch movies from Eros. The TV has its own app store with a curated list of apps. It does not have Google play services installed, but you can install apps via apk. I managed to install YouTube for Android TV, Netflix, MX Player, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Instagram. I installed the VLC player and accessed the movie titles stored on my computer. It does not support DLNA, which is a big deal breaker for me. The TV has got limited 8GB of storage and apps cannot be installed in external storage. It has TV Manager app to clear cache memory and clean up the storage once in a while.

It has 2 GB of RAM and frankly I don’t see a need for a higher RAM as I am not going to load any games on it. Having said that, I would also say that 3 GB RAM would have made the UI faster and snappier. I am yet to check out the 65 inch variant, which has 3 GB of RAM.

I played Divx, MPG, MP4, AVI, MKV, Full HD H.246 and also HEVC UHD H.265 files and I was happy that the TV was able to recognize and play any format of video that I threw in. The default player is able to switch between multiple audio track and sub-title files.

The settings can be accessed from the app screen. There are quick settings which are context sensitive to the home-screen you are in. It can be accessed from the button in the smart remote. The X3-55 runs on a quad-core processor clocked at 1.4 GHz. It has Mali T760 for graphics processing. It has a dedicated MACE-Pro4 engine for image processing. The user interface response time is a bit laggy. Also booting up takes more than 30 seconds, which includes the Leeco intro video which cannot be disabled. I found the slow boot-up time and response time a bit annoying, but that is the case with any Android TV in the market.

LeEco membership

On the boot logo, the caption says, “I am not a TV, I am an internet Ecosystem”. The LeTV SuperTVs come with 2 years of VIP membership for the LeEco Ecosystem. This Ecosystem gives you access to 100s of live TV channels, 1000s of Movie titles and 1000s of music titles (coming soon). If you have a high-speed internet connection with enough bandwidth, you can enjoy these services. I have been enjoying these services on my Le Max 2 and watching them on a bigger screen definitely makes a huge difference.

Availability

The LeTV Super3 X55 4K TV is priced at Rs 59790 which includes 2 years of LeEco membership. The TV is available to purchase from LeMall.com. It has free shipping, installation, 2 years warranty and 4 years warranty on the panel. LeEco have setup 333 service centers across the nation. As the TV is available exclusively online, it would be great if LeEco sets up experience centers in major cities, for people to experience the TV before making the purchase.

Verdict

For the price of Rs 60k, you get a 55 inch 4K TV. It may not be the latest generation or model from LeTV, that is available outside the country. But it would make sense only to compare it with what is available in the current market. Ofcourse LeTV could have made their latest generation available in India, but the import/custome duty and other license costs would have sky-rocketed the price. This generation of model that is available in India has no competitors in the price segment. TCL has not announced the price of its 55 inch model and they dont have any plans for anything bigger than that. Sony is 4x the cost of X3-55 and Samsung 4K TVs start at Rs 1.25 lakh. It has limited apps and the content consumption experience is designed around the LeEco Ecosystem and that would make it only a pseudo-smart TV. For 60k, this is definitely a great TV. It is not a great TV, just because it is priced at Rs 60k. It has fantastic display, the picture quality is stunning and the TV offers a plethora of connectivity options. If you are looking for a large 4K TV with stunning performance, you must definitely consider the LeEco Super3 X55.

Buy it from: Lemall.com

Glossary

UHD -  Ultra-high-definition television (also known as Ultra HD television, Ultra HD, UHDTV, UHD, UHD-1, Super Hi-Vision, and 2160p) today includes 4K UHD (2160p) and 8K UHD (4320p), which are two digital video formats

ARC - ARC is an audio link meant to replace other cables between the TV and the A/V receiver or speaker system. This direction is used when the TV is the one that generates or receives the video stream instead of the other equipment. A typical case is the running of an app on a smart TV such as Netflix, but reproduction of audio is handled by the other equipment. Without ARC, the audio output from the TV needs to be routed by another cable, typically TOS-Link or coax, into the speaker system.

MHL - Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) is an industry standard for a mobile audio/video interface that allows consumers to connect mobile phones, tablets, and other portable consumer electronics (CE) devices to high-definition televisions (HDTVs) and audio receivers.

YPbPr -YPBPR is a color space used in video electronics, in particular in reference to component video cables. YPBPR is the analog version of the YCBCR color space; the two are numerically equivalent, but YPBPR is designed for use in analog systems whereas YCBCR is intended for digital video.

Source: Wikipedia