Medion Life X16513 TV test and review: Ultra HD for the middle class

Test results

Medion Life X16513 is the first UHD TV from the Ger­man man­u­fac­tur­er. How­ev­er, we did not see any­thing super­nat­ur­al dur­ing the tests. The 65-inch TV showed a good pic­ture and rich sound, but its equip­ment and Smart-TV func­tion­al­i­ty turned out to be very poor. All this means that we can con­sid­er this mod­el from Medion only an inex­pen­sive entry-lev­el 4K TV for all those who will use an exter­nal media play­er in one way or anoth­er.

Test results Medion Life X16513

4K and HDR for little money

Bar­ring the excep­tion of the Sam­sung UE65MU6179, there sim­ply aren’t any 65-inch 4K TVs worth rec­om­mend­ing for under €1,000. Medion wants to make a dif­fer­ence with the Life X16513 and promis­es bet­ter pic­ture qual­i­ty for “only” 999 euros.

On paper, the spec­i­fi­ca­tions of this mod­el are real­ly good: the 65-inch device offers a UHD res­o­lu­tion (3840x2160 pix­els), a dynam­ic con­trast ratio of 52000: 1 and HDR sup­port for bet­ter col­or repro­duc­tion and con­trast.

With­in the walls of the test lab, we mea­sured a respectable max­i­mum bright­ness of 460 cd/m2, thanks to which the pic­ture on the Medion remains bright even in well-lit rooms. The sta­t­ic con­trast ratio turns out to be (and the IPS pan­el is to blame for this) rel­a­tive­ly low — 1004:1, but the sta­bil­i­ty of the view­ing angles com­pared to mod­els equipped with clas­sic VA pan­els is notice­ably bet­ter. Thanks to HDR sup­port, the col­ors and con­trasts of the respec­tive con­tent look rich and nat­ur­al.

Over­all pic­ture qual­i­ty is good, whether the source is exter­nal devices such as Blu-ray play­ers or the built-in triple tuner (DVB-T2/C/S2). The fact that this TV received only a good rat­ing is due to the pres­ence of much more expen­sive and “fan­cy” com­peti­tors in the rat­ing.

The sound qual­i­ty of the two 12W speak­ers is pleas­ant and suf­fi­cient for a home liv­ing room. But for those who place par­tic­u­lar val­ue on deep bass and detailed high fre­quen­cies, we advise you to use a sep­a­rate sound sys­tem. In gen­er­al, the results in the test dis­ci­plines “Image Qual­i­ty” and “Sound Qual­i­ty” do not leave rea­sons for nit-pick­ing Medion Life X16513. The promised enjoy­ment of home the­ater can real­ly be felt.

Weak point — equipment

The test results look quite dif­fer­ent in the “Equip­ment” test cat­e­go­ry, where the down­side of low cost becomes very notice­able. While more expen­sive com­peti­tors lure buy­ers in with top-end fea­tures like Ambi­ligh, smart voice con­trol, and even a great selec­tion of games, there’s not much to be found in the Medion Life X16513.

The TV has three HDMI ports, a VGA input, and two USB inter­faces. The lat­ter can serve both to play con­tent from exter­nal sources, and to record cur­rent TV pro­grams on con­nect­ed hard dri­ves. When choos­ing movies to watch, you should also take into account the fact that there is no DivX sup­port.

The mod­el can con­nect to the Inter­net via LAN or WLAN mod­ule. How­ev­er, you will not have too much space for enter­tain­ment due to the lim­i­ta­tions of Smart OS. For exam­ple, there are no Ama­zon Instant Video and Max­dome apps, and the expan­sion options are very lim­it­ed com­pared to Android TV and sim­i­lar sys­tems. How­ev­er, you can still use YouTube and Net­flix. If these fea­tures are not enough, a media play­er will come to the res­cue.

With­out voice con­trol and a sec­ond key­pad remote con­trol, con­trol­ling the Medion Life X16513 becomes rel­a­tive­ly dif­fi­cult. How­ev­er, the TV does have a smart­phone app that helps with set­ting it up.

Surprisingly Energy Efficient

We would like to point out the low lev­el of ener­gy con­sump­tion with a plus sign. In nor­mal oper­a­tion, despite not the most ener­gy effi­cient IPS pan­el, the TV con­sumes only 100 watts, and this fig­ure can be made even low­er by acti­vat­ing the Eco-mode. Stand­by con­sumes 0.5W. This meets the require­ments of the A+ ener­gy effi­cien­cy label.

Alternative: Samsung UE65MU6179

Even more afford­able and some­what bet­ter equipped is the Sam­sung UE65MU6179. The 65-inch UHD TV has all the func­tion­al­i­ty of the Medion mod­el we test­ed. It sup­ports USB record­ing, has a DivX codec, and offers a much more advanced oper­at­ing sys­tem. The qual­i­ty of the image and sound is about the same as that of the Medion Life, and only the max­i­mum bright­ness is a lit­tle low­er — a small draw­back that the price tag of the device will help to get along with: about 70,000 rubles.

Pho­to: man­u­fac­tur­ing com­pa­nies

Characteristics and test results of Medion Life X16513

Test results Medion Life X16513