realme Smart TV 43-inch Review: A Complete Smart TV Experience

In less than 3 years, realme has turned itself from another smartphone brand into a venerable tech lifestyle brand. This time around, they are bringing the realme Smart TV series into the Philippines. Will it be able to deliver the same great price-to-performance ratio that other realme devices have given its consumers?

realme Smart TV 

Design and Looks

For this review, we will be taking a look at the 43-inch version of the realme Smart TV. Based on the specifications, however, both it and the 32-inch model basically have the same feature set with the only difference being the screen size and resolution.

The realme Smart TV 43-inch version comes with minimal bezels at the edges. Its bezels even have smaller footprint than other midrange 4K models of yesteryear, which is an impressive feat given that this is the brand’s first foray into large displays.

Its logo is placed at the bottom that largely keeps out of the way of the whole design of the TV. Just at the bottom is a singular button that turns it on and off if you the remote is out of reach. Unfortunately, that is its only function and does not support any additional options like navigation or volume controls.

The TV itself isn’t that particularly thick measuring only a smidge over 23cm overall. At the back is a standard 200 x 200 VESA mount, which means that the TV should be compatible with most TV racks or wall mounts in the market.

The realme Smart TV is held up by two stands positioned near the edge of the TV. They are not particularly chunky nor heavy plastic but the TV is surprisingly lightweight at only 6.7kg despite its 43-inch size. They also have rubber feet that minimizes accidental movement when the TV is placed on a flat surface.

Connectivity

The TV has a fairly wide selection of wired ports at the back. At the side is its first set of ports which include an HDMI ARC, S/PDIF1 audio out, a 3.5mm audio jack, antenna, AV, and a USB port. The bottom, meanwhile, adds in two more HDMI ports, an Ethernet LAN port, and another USB connection.

On the wireless front, the device supports Bluetooth 5.0 and 2.4GHz WiFi connections. It does have Chromecast support which means that you can easily cast content and control playback on supported apps like Netflix or YouTube right on your smartphones without any additional input.

Remote Control

The remote control that ships with the realme Smart TV veers away from the traditional design and moves towards a smart TV-oriented look. Its thin, light, and reasonably small compared to other TV remotes that come bundled.

Its design has been sculpted to be more comfortable in the hand instead of being just a brick that you hold. A total of twelve buttons are present, which include long standards such as the power button, mute button, volume controls, home, select, settings, and navigation keys. Three buttons have been set as dedicated shortcuts to Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime, while the button between the volume controls is its Google Assistant toggle.

The realme Smart TV’s bundled remote supports both Bluetooth allowing it to control the TV without a direct line of sight. While it feels solid enough, its settings button does not actually open up the settings menu on the TV. Instead, it goes to the settings of the app you are using. Tinkering with the picture and audio settings would need to be done by accessing the settings menu via the gear icon on the home menu.

Operating System and General Performance

Powering the realme Smart TV is a quad-core Cortex-A53 CPU and a Mali-470 MP3 GPU with 1GB of RAM running Android TV based on Android 9.0 Pie. Everything is fairly easy to navigate and the home page presents you with every shortcut and app you need to get started.

The TV automatically ships with several apps pre-installed. This includes the usual apps like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Pango Browser, and Google mainstays such as YouTube, Play Movies, and Play Games. AI PONT is also installed on the device as a quick shortcut app that can redirect you to installed apps in the system. You get access to 8GB of internal storage in case you want to download more apps through the Play Store.

Exploring the realme Smart TV’s OS is incredibly straightforward thanks to the remote. Everything feels responsive but not as snappy or immediate as we would have liked it to be. Opening apps is quick but there is a there is a slight loading pause once we press the button. It’s not a big deal, but it is noticeable to more performance-oriented users.

realme is including seven display presets on the TV: Standard, Vivid, Sport, Movie, Game, Energy Saving, and User. The TV also includes more customization options like Backlight, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue, Sharpness, Gamma, and Color Temperature. It also gets access to a Color Tuner and White Balance Correction for those who want to perfect the viewing experience as much as possible.

Display and Audio

It seems that realme is using a Vertical Alignment (VA) panel on these batch of Smart TVs instead of the usual IPS screens. This allows the TV to deliver deeper blacks but colors could be better. There is also slight lack of detail when it comes to color-intensive scenes. It’s as if there is a bit of blending on similar – but different – colors.

This may be the effect of realme applying Chroma Boost on the TV. Colors are aggressive at times and lose some of their finer details. Skin on characters are also odd upon close inspection. It seems that they have passed through some kind of beautification process with their skin becoming occasionally too smooth to our liking.

Now in animation, all its minute quirks turn into more advantages. The smoothing on the skin is now totally gone while its overly dynamic color reproduction adds more contrast to scenes while watching.

Brightness, on the other hand, is serviceable. The brand says that it can reach a peak brightness of 400nits. The screen itself has a slightly shiny finish but not enough to completely reflect images. Brightness can also be tuned to be comfortable in dark rooms while still having enough power to produce bright images if you want it to.

realme is putting a total of four speakers on the TV, which they say totals about 24W of power. Each set on the TV is composed of one full-range speaker and a tweeter. The former uses a dynamic ring-driven structure to deliver better base and vocals while the latter can expand the audio system’s frequency width and increases potency of the lower frequencies.

Its speakers offer a decent listening experience with some caveats. Generally, we were pleasantly surprised that the built-in speakers were able to produce such volume and clarity. Once we got into the upper echelons of the volume meter, the speakers started to sound a somewhat tinny and slightly loses definition. Its bass is also a bit lacking in punch especially in bass-heavy scenes.

Conclusion

Starting at PhP 11,990 for the 32-inch variant and PhP 18,990 for the larger 43-inch version, the realme Smart TV offers a solid enough experience for the price. It comes with a decent screen with good black reproduction, relatively lag-free performance, a complete Android feature set, and a clean-looking design fit for any home.

It does come with a few quirks. Colors tend to be overly saturated at times most likely due to the implementation of Chroma Boost while its speakers can show their limitations at the upper end of the volume range. Its remote even comes with downsides by lacking a dedicated settings menu where you can quickly adjust settings on-the-fly.

Despite these minor nitpicks, we believe that the realme Smart TV is a good jumping off point for the brand for its entry in the TV market and a sound pick for people who are upgrading to an Android TV or even to those who just like the realme ecosystem.

Interested in getting realme Smart TV to upgrade your home? You can get the 32-inch version or the 43-inch variant through the official realme Shopee store.