I spent just $137 on a Roku TV for one of the bedrooms in my house (specifically for my teenage daughter), and I’m impressed.
If you need an additional TV for a spare bedroom, or you just want to save some money, Roku makes their own line of TVs and they’re an excellent value. The TV I bought has all the benefits you expect from Roku but actually adds some additional features you can’t get with a Roku streaming stick.
Roku makes their own TVs
And the prices are great
Roku sells three lines of its own TVs. The Select line is the mainstream value line, spanning HD sizes up to 40″ and 4K models from 43″ all the way to 85″. The Plus line steps up with a QLED panel, full-array local dimming, and Dolby Vision. The Pro line is the flagship, adding a Mini-LED backlight, a 120Hz refresh rate, Dolby Vision IQ, plus a rechargeable backlit remote — and it only comes in 55″, 65″, and 75″.
Obviously, if you are going for a larger size and want the best, the Pro line is the way to go. But for a TV for a spare room or bedroom, the Select line represents outstanding value.
The TV I bought was Roku’s 40″ 40R3E5 Select model, which is a 1080p panel that offers a viewing experience that is more than acceptable for a bedroom. While I paid $137, the price has since gone up to $158 (but it frequently goes on sale), which still represents a great value.
Who makes the actual panels for Roku TV? It’s not Roku themselves, obviously, as making panels is a specialty that goes to only a handful of manufacturers in the world. Depending on model, Roku panels are made by either TCL, HKC, or BOE. Most of these companies make fine panels, though perhaps not at the same caliber as Samsung, which is reflected in the price of Roku TVs. The picture quality of Roku TVs, and you can confirm this if you go to your local Best Buy to compare them, is solid but not the highest caliber compared to panels made by the biggest suppliers of panels like Samsung, LG and Sharp.
All the things you like about Roku, built into a TV
Roku is the most popular streaming platform for good reason (and these tricks make it even better). I’m not going to explain what you already know, but Roku’s ecosystem of streaming apps, the quality of their voice remote, and their integration with nearly all smart home and voice platforms (Alexa/Google/Siri) makes Roku an easy “yes” when picking a streaming device (and when you don’t need Nvidia’s 256-core streamer).
And you can add Roku to pretty much any TV starting at $29 with their streaming stick (or $49 for the 4K streaming stick), all the way up to their acclaimed $99 Roku Ultra streaming solution.
But actually, buying a Roku TV gives you some added features and benefits you can’t get on a streaming stick.
Buying a Roku TV gives you some exclusive features
You can’t get these with a regular Roku stick
You could buy the $49 4K stick instead, but on a 40″ bedroom panel like this one, 1080p is plenty, and the stick’s 4K resolution does you no good without a 4K TV to display it on. What the stick can’t give you, at any resolution, are a handful of neat features.
Among them is Bluetooth support, either for external speakers or headphones. The headphone support is particularly useful, especially if you sleep with a partner, allowing you to listen to the TV without disturbing the person next to you.
In addition, you can plug in your own antenna to get terrestrial over-the-air high definition stations, which actually gives you a lot of free viewing choices (including dozens of channels). If you don’t have an antenna, you can make your own for cheap. If you take the step of adding an antenna to your Roku TV, you’re then able to use the voice remote to search across streaming as well as over-the-air content.
Something else you can do with a Roku TV that you can’t do with a Roku stick is local media playback with the USB port. Using the Roku Media Player, you can load your own content onto a thumb drive and access it from your Roku TV.
One remote, one input, zero HDMI ports (if you want)
The beauty of using Roku and the fact that it fills all of your streaming needs is that you don’t have to plug anything into it, unless you want to. For inputs, you get three HDMI inputs (including one that has ARC support), plus you have optical audio output if you’re using a soundbar or receiver, plus composite input if you have an older device to plug in. The Pro Series adds HDMI 2.1 for 4K/120Hz gaming; the Select and Plus lines are HDMI 2.0.
Here’s what it’s missing
I probably wouldn’t use this as my main living room TV
Like you, I put the best TV in the living room, which for me is a 75″ 4K QLED from Samsung, and I probably wouldn’t put a larger-format Roku in my living room just because I have extremely high standards for my main TV, and in my opinion, these larger sizes should be from companies like Samsung that make their own panels end-to-end. But despite that, I didn’t need a 10/10 viewing experience since this was going in a bedroom, and for that, this Roku TV was perfect.