Ecostar 4K UHD TV Cuts Corners to Reduce Costs [Review]

When it comes to buying a TV in Pakistan, there are a lot of options available in the market and consumers are presented with a bunch of options to choose from such as buying a smart TV, a regular LED TV or maybe a curved TV and all of these options come from several manufacturers as well.

Today, we are looking at the Ecostar 4K UHD TV which also happens to be a smart TV and comes with some nice specifications and features.

Ecostar 55″ 930 Series Review

Talking about the connectivity options first, you get a bunch of ports you’d expect on the back. There’s HDMI, USB ports, an optical port, a slot for a TF card, Video etc. In short, you get all the necessary ports on a TV.

Moving to the front, it has a 55-inch LED panel with thin bezels around it. The bottom is a bit thicker though since it houses the Harmon/Kardon sound bar.

Impressive Sound

Speaking of sound, it was a great experience sitting and listening to the output from these speakers. The sound is clear and very balanced. I didn’t turn the volume up all the way but even midway (which was still pretty loud), there was no distortion from the speakers and whatever content you are using it for, be it movies or music, it will sound pleasing to the ears.

In terms of hardware, you get 1.5GB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. These may seem like low specifications for a smartphone but for a TV these are actually good enough and helps the TV run smoothly for the most part, though I did encounter some issues with its performance.

App Issues and Multitasking

Being a smart TV, there are a bunch of applications pre-installed on it which takes up valuable storage space.

Moreover, some applications such as YouTube need to be installed from the Play Store which took quite a while to install. When I opened it up for the first time, it was very laggy and eventually crashed. The same thing happened with the browser.

Forget multitasking with different applications open, it was nearly impossible to use two tabs at once in the built-in browser. Navigation was laggy and the tabs kept refreshing when switching in between them.

Image Quality

As for the picture quality of the TV, it is a 4K TV so viewing actual 4K content on it is a treat. Colors are balanced, not overly saturated and the viewing angles were ok as well. One thing to note here that this TV does not support HDR and using the TV in a dimly lit environment, you can see light bleeding out, especially near the corners.

Price and Verdict

Now let’s get to the elephant in the room and that’s the price. This particular model costs Rs. 109,000.

For this price, it does offer a fair bit of value but it is still missing a few important things, HDR being the biggest of them. Not to mention the stigma associated with the Ecostar brand by some people makes it a tough sell when products from other well-known manufacturers are available in the same price range.

To make matters worse, some of them even have more features than this TV. All in all, it doesn’t offer the same value as its competitors in the same price range as it’s missing HDR and the “smart TV” bit seems more like an afterthought.