Amazon has taken care of the larger part of the living room with the new Fire TV Omni Series — the first-ever Amazon-built televisions — but it hasn’t forgotten about the smaller side. Enter the new Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max. As the name implies, it’s basically the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K — already the best Amazon Fire TV device for most people — just made even better. Mostly.
The Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max, and Alexa Voice Remote.Amazon
You’ve still got support for 4K resolution. You’ve still got support for Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and Dolby Atmos. You’ve still got the newish Alexa Voice Remote. It’s still, well, a stick.
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And perhaps most important is that it lands at a very approachable $55.
But new this time around — and this is the part that makes the Max the stick to get — is the addition of support for Wi-Fi 6 (aka 802.11ax, for those who refuse to follow the new naming convention). That means better networking, allowing for greater range and speed. And that means a better streaming experience for you, most likely. (Everyone’s home networking experience is going to be different of course.)
And for the gamers, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max will support Luna, Amazon’s cloud gaming service.
And that’s all enabled by upgraded internals. The Fire TV Stick 4K Max is 40% more powerful than the Fire TV Stick 4K, Amazon says. It sports a new quad-core 1.8GHz processor. It’s got 2 gigabytes of RAM. And like the new Amazon Fire TV Omni Series, it’s got Alexa Home Theater running out of the box, which means you can hook it up to any Amazon Echo speakers you want.
And to go one further — the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max has earned Energy Star certification and sports Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly badge. Its packaging also is made up of 97% wood fiber-based materials from responsibility managed forests or recycled sources.
The introduction of the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max doesn’t mean the death of the Fire TV Stick 4K. Amazon says it will continue to be sold. And while Amazon didn’t give us any indication that it was a while-supplies-last sort of thing, it also didn’t give any sort of timeline for a possible switcheroo. As it stands today, the Fire TV Stick 4K is listed at retail for $50, but is currently being sold on a “limited-time deal” for $40. Also still available are the 2019 Amazon Fire TV Cube, the 2020 Fire TV Stick Lite, and the 2020 third-generation Fire TV Stick.
YouTube TV finally gets the 4K Plus plan’s price right
The price of the 4K Plus add-on for YouTube TV always has been a bit weird. Technically the add-on has been $20 a month since its launch in mid-2021, but subscribers have always gotten the first year of service for half that. And that will remain true come April 2023, when the YouTube TV base plan goes up to $73 a month and the add-on changes price to $10 a month, with the first year of service at $5 a month.
That's a much more palatable price for an add-on that's absolutely an extravagance.
Why aren’t sports in 4K and HDR? It’s harder than you think
I don’t know if we can pinpoint a moment at which 4K content became normalized -- it sort of snuck up on us -- but today 4K and 4K HDR content is not hard to come by. Netflix, Amazon, Disney +, HBO Max – they all have it, and plenty of it. So we’re starting to get used to it. We’re hungry for 4K and we expect it on our plate. This has a lot of folks wondering: Why is it so hard to get sports in 4K?
Three years ago, I was fortunate enough to fly down to Florida to go behind the scenes with Fox Sports as it delivered the first-ever 4K HDR Super Bowl broadcast. Not only did I get to watch the Fox team do its live daytime broadcasts from South Beach, but I also got to go to roam around Hard Rock Stadium, where I had totally unfettered access to the stadium and all the cameras in it – as well as a massive broadcast compound. I got to go in every production truck, I saw every step of the production, from the cameras to the outbound feeds, and I got every question I asked answered by some of the top video production pros in the business. I learned so much while I was there.
Leica launches the Hisense-powered $8,300 Cine 1, its first 4K Laser TV, at CES 2023
Legendary German photography company Leica Camera has debuted its first Laser TV at CES 2023. The Leica Cine 1 is a 4K, triple-laser ultra short throw (UST) projector made in partnership with Hisense. It will be available in both 100-inch and 120-inch versions with prices starting at $8,295 when it hits the U.S. market in the third quarter of 2023. Leica plans to sell the Cine 1 in Europe in the spring.
Though the laser guts of the Cine 1 will be built by Hisense, Leica says it's adding its own distinct touches to the Laser TV to ensure it delivers on people's expectations of the Leica brand. This includes a Leica-engineered Summicron lens that has been matched to the projector's image size, as well as Leica's own image processing (Leica Image Optimization, or LIO) to optimize picture quality with special algorithms.
