Roku Pro Series (2025) TV Review: A Powerful Upgrade for a Premium Viewing Experience

The Roku Pro Series (2025) TV is a strong and distinctive upgrade compared to last year's model, offering significant improvements in color accuracy and sound quality, while maintaining its unique design that makes it an excellent choice for wall mounting. This release is a valuable addition to the budget and mid-range TV market.

Pros and Cons

• Pros: Improved color and sound accuracy, innovative "shadow box" design, and hands-free voice control.
• Cons: Limited bass, and very slight vignetting in the corners.

Overview

The original release of the Roku Pro Series (2024) garnered impressive reviews, and this updated 2025 version continues to impress users. While the differences at first glance may seem minor—apart from larger support stands—the improvements in audio and picture quality are noteworthy.

The design is appreciated, maintaining many aspects of the previous iteration. The "shadowbox" design may appear oddly thick compared to modern TVs, but it offers significant benefits for wall mounting and contributes to sound quality. The port selection remains unchanged, but the HDMI ports that support faster refresh rates are now clearly labeled. The Pro Series (2025) TV also comes with Roku's best remote control.

Just like last year, the Roku Pro Series TV ranks among the best TVs in its price category. It is certainly a step up compared to the also excellent Roku Plus series. Although it doesn't possess the same brightness and contrast as premium TVs, it supports Dolby Vision and HDR10+, and utilizes Mini-LED backlighting with local dimming. Mini-LED technology uses thousands of tiny LEDs to illuminate the screen from behind, allowing for precise control over lighting across multiple local dimming zones. This leads to significant improvements in contrast levels, delivering deeper blacks and more vibrant and clearer colors, and helps reduce "blooming" around bright objects on dark backgrounds. It also offers exceptional brightness, making it ideal for bright rooms, and provides a viewing experience closer to OLED TVs, but often at a more competitive price in larger screen sizes.

Price and Release Date

The Roku Pro Series (2025) TV was launched in June 2025, offering prices consistent with last year's models:

• 55-inch: $899.99
• 65-inch: $1,199.99
• 75-inch: $1,699.99

This TV competes with other good value series like the TCL QM6K and TCL QM7K, and Amazon Fire TV Omni Mini-LED TVs.

Specifications

• Screen Type: QLED with Mini-LED.
• Refresh Rate: 120 Hz.
• HDR Support: Dolby Vision IQ, HDR10+ Adaptive, HDR10, HLG.
• Audio Support: Dolby Atmos.
• Smart System: Roku TV.
• HDMI Ports: 4 (including 2x HDMI 2.1).
• Built-in Tuner: ATSC 1.0.

Features

The Roku Pro Series (2025) TV offers many features expected in modern TVs, such as Apple AirPlay support and the ability to connect headphones and speakers via Bluetooth. It is also compatible with multiple smart home systems, including Roku Smart Home, Apple HomeKit, Alexa, and Google Home.

The HDR support includes Dolby Vision IQ and HDR10+ Adaptive technologies. Dolby Vision IQ is known for its ability to dynamically enhance picture quality based on content type and ambient lighting conditions in the room, ensuring the best viewing experience in any environment. Similarly, HDR10+ Adaptive automatically adjusts brightness and contrast for each scene in the content, taking into account ambient lighting to achieve more realistic and detailed images. One of the most notable features is hands-free voice control, which can be accessed via the remote control simply by speaking to the TV using the activation word "Hey Roku." A major upgrade from last year's model is the addition of Roku Smart Picture Max, which, like Dolby Vision, adjusts picture quality on a scene-by-scene basis, automatically changing picture modes, colors, sharpness, and contrast.

Picture Quality

The picture quality has seen improvements in color accuracy and good brightness. Peak HDR brightness, when measured on a 10% white window pattern, reached 821 nits in Filmmaker mode and 841 nits in Standard mode. When measuring full-screen brightness, the numbers reached 375 and 390 nits, respectively. These results are considered average for a budget Mini-LED TV. However, when selecting the "Brightest" setting for each mode, HDR brightness results doubled to 1,752 nits in Filmmaker mode and 1,818 nits in Standard mode, which is a significant and very useful difference when watching in a brightly lit room.

The TV's color gamut coverage reached 96.9% of UHDA-P3 and 80.6% of BT.2020, which are very good figures, though similar to those of mid-range Mini-LED TVs like the TCL QM8K. The most significant improvement was in color accuracy, which decreased from 3.9 in last year's model to 2.6 this year (closer to zero is better). In practice, the images produced by the screen are clear and vibrant. Roku has worked to reduce "blooming," and images appeared clean and well-defined even with strong contrast and bright colors. The TV also performs well in motion processing, ensuring clarity for fast-moving objects.

Audio Quality

The Roku Pro Series (2025) TV features very good sound quality for a television. It's good enough that you might not feel the need to buy a soundbar, unless you desire surround sound, spatial audio, or a subwoofer. The audio is at a basic soundbar level, which is commendable for a TV. The internal speaker chambers in this version have been enlarged, allowing for higher volume levels and a greater sense of space, and they have been pushed out slightly to improve the soundstage. Although the difference is not significant compared to the previous version, which was also good, Roku's continuous efforts to improve audio are appreciated.

Regarding the frequency range, the treble is good enough to provide clear details when listening to music, while the mid-frequencies are rich, adding depth to music and sound effects, and helping to highlight dialogue. However, the low end (bass) is very weak, which is expected in this category. The soundstage offers good imaging, meaning sound direction (left or right, near or far) is clear. While it doesn't have the same spaciousness as external home theater systems, it is impressive for a TV's built-in sound system. Good audio settings are also available, such as adjusting the audio output depending on whether the TV is wall-mounted or not, EQ sliders for high and low frequencies, and preset audio modes like dialogue mode and night mode.

Design

The "shadowbox" design was one of the favorite aspects of the previous iteration, and this design remains in the 2025 version. Although it appears thicker than most current TVs when viewed from the side, it is still an attractive television. More importantly, when wall-mounted, this shape sits flush, like a picture frame, making it more appealing compared to most TVs that taper at the back and appear to hang away from the wall. This thick design also contributes to more space for the internal speakers, enhancing the TV's overall sound quality.

From the front, there are very thin bezels around the screen, except for the bottom, which is about half an inch high to display the Roku logo. The screen itself is reflective, but no worse than any other mid-range or budget TV. The back of the TV is more interesting from a design perspective. The lower back is curved in a way that allows all cables from the ports and power supply to run neatly downwards in the center, keeping the TV flat against the wall when mounted. Additionally, strategically placed straps prevent cables from tangling.

There are four HDMI ports, two of which are version 2.1 and support 120Hz refresh rates from external sources like gaming consoles. Unlike last year's version, these ports are clearly marked. There are also USB-A and USB-C ports, a LAN port (for wired Ethernet connection), an optical digital audio output, and an antenna input. In addition to the marked HDMI ports, the presence of an extra USB port for connecting the remote control's charging cable is appreciated. As for the remote control, it is the same second-generation Roku Voice Remote Pro, which not only supports hands-free voice control (you can speak to it with the activation word "Hey Roku") but also has two reprogrammable buttons for creating shortcuts to favorite apps.

Smart System and Menus

Smart TV interfaces typically come in two types: an icon grid or a varied content strip. Roku uses the icon design, which is a less cluttered and cleaner-looking design, although you need to open apps to browse content. However, Roku now displays some suggested content at the top, as well as a "What to Watch" tab that shows rows of selected media, including a "Continue Watching" row. As with most smart TV manufacturers, Roku offers free ad-supported content. Of course, there's the Roku Channel, plus the new Howdy by Roku app which offers ad-free viewing at a very low price. There's also a sports tab with some free content available.

Regarding the actual TV settings, all settings are integrated into the Roku operating system, which is common these days. Even better, settings can be adjusted for each input individually, and inputs can even be renamed, in addition to connecting various Bluetooth devices like headphones. There are many settings that the user can adjust for picture quality, such as HDR adjustment (or turning it off completely), various motion settings for sports, local dimming, precise contrast, and all sorts of color and color temperature settings. You can make a lot of fine adjustments.

Gaming

Roku hasn't forgotten gamers in the Pro Series. There isn't a dedicated game mode TV menu like on some other TVs, but there is support for 4K 120Hz input on two of the HDMI ports. When a next-gen console is turned on, the TV can automatically switch to this input (a setting that needs to be enabled). The TV will also automatically switch to game mode, which adjusts picture settings.

The features that make the Roku Pro Series (2025) good for gaming also contribute to its quality for other types of media. The TV performs well with sports, so it's no surprise that it can handle fast-moving objects on screen, whether it's a sports game like NBA 2K25 or a shooting game. Even games like Dead Island 2, where you move around trying to dodge zombies, require good motion processing. The TV's good brightness, along with HDR support and solid colors, make games look vibrant. The measured input lag is also very low, at 9.3 milliseconds in game mode, resulting in highly responsive performance.

Value

At around $1200 for the 65-inch model tested, the Roku Pro Series TV is reasonably priced, though it faces strong competition from other budget and mid-range Mini-LED TVs. For example, the TCL QM6K is an excellent choice for a mid-range TV and can be found discounted for under $700 at the same size. The QM6K offers great colors and contrast, but its brightness and sound quality are not on par. Of course, if you like the idea of the Roku Pro but not the price, the newer Roku Plus series will give you most of the features for less. By spending around $650 on the 65-inch version, you'll get a 4K Mini-LED TV that supports Dolby Vision and HDR10+, but you won't get the same sound quality, "shadowbox" design, or 4K 120Hz support. The Roku Pro Series represents good value compared to the competition, partly due to its enhanced audio and some of Roku's unique design choices. This makes it a better value than the Roku Plus models.