Smart TV is the new the rage in 2018. It is no more epitome of luxury found only in grand rooms of people with white-collared jobs or owners of the big businesses. More and more companies are striving to bring out TV at an affordable price for the masses and iFFALCON is one of them. iFFALCON is the subsidiary of TCL—globally third largest manufacturer of televisions. TCL is using iFFALCON to target budget-centric customers to offer them 4K/Smart TV at an unbelievable price. In the past few months, a lot of companies offering cheap Smart TVs are mushrooming in Indian market especially in the online space. We saw Mi launching its Smart TV in March, Thompson in April, and now iFFALCON joins its cohorts. iFFALCON has a strong advantage of capital, R&D, and global supply chain of its parent company, TCL. iFFALCON have an exclusive partnership with Flipkart and it won’t be available in local stores. Dearth of the option to easily customize TV without needing to install add-ons (like Amazon Firestick) is the reason TCL proclaims behind the launching of iFFALCON TV brand in India. iFFALCON offers only Smart TV models in three sizes: 32’ (HD resolution), 40’ (Full-HD resolution) and 55’ (4K resolution).
Key iFFALCON TV Technologies and Features
Appealing Design with Metallic Frame and Slim Bezel
The biggest problem with budget TVs is that they often look bland and flimsy. It becomes little embarrassing, especially if your intent is to flaunt the Smart TV in front of the guest. Thankfully, that’s not the case with iFFALCON televisions. Models like 55k2A have a sleek metallic frame that makes it look elegant in any living room. The brushed metal texture on the TV with slim bezels give the TV a real premium appeal—something which is difficult to find even in some TVs with a price tag of 1 lakh and above. Metal stand given with the TV is made up of metal and is heavy—sturdy enough to steadily hold the giant 55’ TV.
4K TV with A+ Grade Panel
Resolution is one of most defining parameters of LED TVs these days and 4K resolution is the most coveted resolution. It might sound a little overstatement, but prominent TV innovations would not have been possible if it wasn’t for high definition technology. Premium 55’ Smart TV model from iFFALCON comes with 4K resolution. But do keep in mind that the content available on 4K in India is currently limited to a few sports channels and National Geographic. So, unless you watch a lot of 4K movies, you will not get a lot of 4K content in India from your TV cable provider. All the models of iFFALCON use A+ grade display panel which is one of best in its class. The A+ grade display panel meets the highest industry standards to ensure picture quality is clear and rich. A+ stands for achromatic which means ‘no color’. While manufacturing the TV, base panel is made of a transparent material. It improves color transparency. Upon testing no issues were found with the contrast, but the detailing was missing. This becomes evident upon watching a movie with darker scenes.
HDR and True Color to Improve Contrast and Brightness
One prominent factor that has helped the push of 4K TVs is the advent of HDR. The good thing is 55’ premium model from iFFALCON comes with HDR. HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and it significantly expands the range of two important factors—contrast ratio and color accuracy. Thus, the bright parts of the image get much brighter, so it seems image possesses more depth. The color range expands to show brighter blues, greens, reds and everything in between. Thus HDR-compatible movies push TVs to their limit, with brighter highlights, perfect blacks, and wider color gamut. Combining this with the mesmerizingly powerful 4K resolution, movies look nothing less than stunning. HDR is further complimented by True Color LED backlighting technology. The white LED backlight significantly improves the colour gamut to provide dynamic contrast. This aids in giving out brighter details of the picture for the pleasant viewing experience.
4k iFFALCON Smart TV comes with HDR10. HDR10 is the most frequently used and easily available HDR format. As it is open source format, it’s much easier to implement by iFFALON without needing to pay licensing fee.
Micro Dimming for Better Brights and Sharper Darks
All the Smart TV models from iFFALCON come with Micro Dimming technology. What Micro Dimming does is it analyses the video content in a bunch of separate zones to efficiently adjusts the brightness and darkness. This results in a pleasurable viewing experience with the better contrast and the vivid picture quality. Primary benefits of Micro Dimming are summarized below:
- Spatial contrast enhancement
- Brightness improvement
- Black-level enhancement
- Continuous power reduction
Powerful Processor with Complete Connectivity Options
Premium K2A models come with an impeccable hardware. It comes with a quad-core CPU (A53 chipset) and dual-core GPU with 2.5 GB of RAM. All this power is not just great for entertainment apps but also gaming which the TV supports fluently. The internal storage of the 4K TV is of 16 GB. When it comes to connectivity there is no compromise—something which is unprecedented in case of the budget TV. The 55’ model comes with four HDMI ports—two at the back and other two on the side. Well, most of the Smart TV in the 50K price range usually don’t give more than two HDMI ports. We liked the iFFALCON’s generosity here. There are two USB ports of which one is high-speed USB 3.0 port for faster playback of high resolution content. Though the TV has built-in Wi-Fi there’s even an Ethernet port (RJ45) in case you prefer the wired option. Though the TV comes with Dolby surround sound and DTS decoding, still, if you want to connect to external soundbar you can do that using the audio component input.
Certified Android TV OS with Chromecast
The 55’ 4K TV from iFFALCON comes with a certified Android Nougat TV operating system (OS). It’s rare to find certified Android in budget TVs. It comes with all the useful apps like Netflix, Youtube, Hotstar, YupTV, Eros Now, Voot and even JioCinema. Being an Android-certified TV, it obviously comes with a Play Store to download more apps and all the other Smart TV-relevant Google apps like Google Music, Google Play Movies, Google Games etc. TCL the parent company of iFFALCON has established business cooperation with many premium global content providers like Netflix, YouTube, Gameloft and Spotify. This means TV comes with official support from a lot of OTT (over the top) service providers. Moreover, there are a lot of business discussions going on with the other small players and soon they too will be tying up with TCL for their content offering.
Android TV also comes with the Chromecast support. This would allow users to seamless cast content from their smartphones to the Smart TV. This is nice if you have guest comes over to your place and they want to show their favorite video clip on the big screen. iFFALCON Smart TV supports all popular variety of audio and video formats including the latest coding system. Right from the antenna to the USB, and other input channels such as H.264/MKV/MPEG4/MP4/AVI video coding are supported.
ready to be downloaded and updated from Google Play Store.
Two Remotes – Conventional and Modern
Following the footsteps of its parent company (TCL), iFFALCON 4K TVs too comes with dual remote. First one is the long-sized conventional infrared type remote with a button for all the major TV control function and the other is modern minimalistic one. If you don’t want to learn how to use new remote and stick with conventional remote, you can keep using the bigger remote. But the modern compact remote has additional functions like Bluetooth and voice control powered by Google. Voice control makes content discovery fair easier once you are accustomed to the remote. Just say and it finds the content with the searched phrase. As it is Bluetooth-enabled, the mini remote can also be used as an air mouse for easy browsing through the Smart TV menu and content. Bluetooth remote is pretty light weight too.
Stereo Speakers with Dolby and DTS
iFFALCON 4K Smart TV comes with box-shaped stereo speakers with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and DTS decoding capability. The strength of Dolby Digital lies in compressing the size of multichannel audio files without disturbing the sound quality. What Dolby Digital does is, it takes cues from how human ear processes sound and implements it in its own functioning. It provides five bandwidth channels: front right, front left, center, surround right, surround left for amazingly true sound feel. Thus, it expands right and left conventional stereo channels to give listeners enveloping 360 degrees of sound; alternately the “surround sound”. This arrangement also helps in providing clean, crisp dialogue delivery of the onscreen sounds. Dolby Digital is known to deliver lively multichannel sound at low data rates. DTS decoding, on the other hand, uses psychoacoustic principles (how our ears interact with sound in an enclosed space) to deliver correct discernible sounds. DTS decoding improves the bass and also moderates high frequency sounds for proper hearing.
Pros and Cons
For the price which iFFALCON is offering 4K and other Smart TVs, its pros easily outnumber the cons. First pro starts with the appearance. The elegant metal frame conveys a hint of beauty and enhances the viewing experience. This is something we only expect usually in high-range 4K TVs costing 1 lakh and above. iFFALCON is surely debunking this myth with its metallic frame design and slim bezels. Certified and the latest version of Android TV OS advocates heavily for iFFALCON in the budget 4K TV segment. Air mouse with Google voice control is the cherry on the cake. Audio quality is the big plus for iFFALCON too. When compared to 8W speakers on Mi TV, the 16W speakers on the iFFALCON 4K TVs are far loud and gives a wider range of immersive sound. The vocals sound is just right, and there is a significant amount of bass—thanks to Dolby + DTS technology. Additionally, for the audiophiles, iFFALCON 4K TVs has just the right amount of total harmonic distortion (THD), which provides a great balance between various sound frequencies coalesced in the audio.
Though the iFFALCON TV comes with a myriad of connectivity option, the direct 3G dongle plug-and-play support is missing. In the age 4G (with even 5G to be launch soon) this functionality omission should not affect you much. We found the power consumption of the TV to be slightly on a higher side. Though the iFFALCON TVs come with a 1-year warranty it must be remembered that any alteration with the TV would void warranty. Additionally, external accessories like battery, cable etc are not covered in the warranty. Being a new brand iFFALCON has tied up with third-party service providers to deliver customer service. So be mindful of that.
Conclusion
Of late there are quite a few 4K TV options available to the Indian consumers under 50,000 rupees. But then they are often compromised. Some don’t offer Smart TV functions while others come with a custom OS without any official support from the content providers. Both these instances are a deterrent for many consumers who want a 4K Smart TV under 50,000 rupees but don’t want to compromise either. This is the pain point which TCL seems to have recognized. As a result, they came up with iFFALCON—a subsidiary exclusively designed to meet the rising aspiration of the millennials to own a Smart 4K TV on a thrifty budget. iFFALCON seems to have hit almost all the checkboxes that a buyer wants—premium metal design, sliminess in thickness, host of connectivity options, user-friendly interface, good picture quality and immersive sound. Being a relatively new brand and presence only in the online space may cast some apprehensions on the minds of the orthodox buyers. If that is something you can deal with, we can surely recommend iFFALCON 4K Smart TV for a budget of 50,000.
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