There’s a new pair of Sharp Roku TVs on sale in the UK from today, and the interesting bit isn’t really the telly – it’s the price.
The two sets, a 50″ and a 55″, have landed at Argos with 4K, a Mini-LED backlight and Freely built in. The 50″ is £329.99 and the 55″ is £349.99.
To put that in context: back in May, Sharp’s first Roku QLED TV launched at £349 for the 50″ model. Four months on, the same money gets you a bigger screen with a better backlight – or £20 less if you stick with the 50″.
So while this is, on the face of it, another product launch, the real story is how quickly the price of a Freely-equipped Roku TV is coming down.
What You Actually Get
The headline upgrade over the QLED range is Mini-LED. Without getting bogged down in the tech, it’s a backlight that can control brightness across the screen more precisely – deeper blacks, brighter highlights, better contrast.
Beyond that, the two TVs are the same set in two sizes. Here’s what you’re getting:
- Screen sizes: 50″ and 55″, both 4K Ultra HD
- HDR: Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG
- Sound: Dolby Digital Plus
- Connections: 3 x HDMI, 2 x USB, optical out, headphone and AV sockets, Ethernet and Wi-Fi
- Extras: AV1 codec support, Miracast, DLNA, CI+ slot, and voice support for Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri
- Energy rating: F on both
- Guarantee: One year
Argos doesn’t list a refresh rate for either TV, and there’s no HDMI version given – so if you’re buying with a games console in mind, that’s worth pinning down before you part with your money.
The one-year guarantee is also a bit stingy next to the three or five years some rivals include.
Freely Without the Aerial
The Freely part is what many of you will be here for – and interestingly Roku’s own announcement doesn’t mention it at all this time.
If you’re new to it, Freely is Everyone TV’s platform – the same people behind Freeview and Freesat – and it pipes live and on-demand TV from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5 through your broadband rather than an aerial.
Connect an aerial as well and you’ll get your usual Freeview channels through the tuner, so it isn’t an either/or.
Back in May, when the Sharp QLED launched, Freely was front and centre – the headline pairing the whole thing was built around.
A few months on, it’s slipped out of the pitch entirely. It’s only one launch, so it’s not worth reading too much into, but you do wonder whether Freely has quietly gone from being the selling point to just another feature on the box – present, expected, and no longer something worth shouting about.
For a platform meant to become the default, being taken for granted is the goal – so that’s actually good news for Freely.
Either way, none of this is new ground for Sharp. The brand was part of the first wave of Roku TVs with Freely back in June 2025, and the QLED model in May had it too.
What has shifted since then is that buying a whole new TV is no longer the only way in. The Manhattan Aero and the Netgem Pleio now exist as standalone Freely boxes at £89.99 and £99, so if there’s nothing wrong with your current telly and you just want Freely, you don’t need to spend £330 to get it.
There’s one long-running frustration worth repeating, because today’s launch doesn’t fix it.
On every Roku TV with Freely so far, the two systems have run alongside each other rather than truly joining up – Roku’s voice search can’t find live broadcast content, in much the same way Freeview Play never properly melded with the platforms it sat on.
A Busy Year For Roku Over Here
Whatever you make of these particular sets, Roku has been unusually busy in the UK this year.
The Sharp QLED arrived in May. June brought Roku’s first UK smart projectors – starting with the Aurzen EAZZE D1R, which I reviewed and had a lot of fun with once it dropped below its £199.99 sticker, followed by the Sharp H272.
There was a World Cup Football Zone. And the Roku Streaming Stick Plus is still our pick for the best streaming device in the UK, when you take performance AND price into consideration.
The thing casting a shadow over all of it is June’s other bit of Roku news: Fox is buying the company for around $22 billion, with the deal expected to close in the first half of 2027.
Nothing changes for your Roku kit in the meantime – but it’s a fair thing to keep half an eye on, given Roku already makes roughly half its money from advertising, and its new owner has said out loud that it wants to push that side of the business harder.
There’s also the matter of Roku’s redesigned home screen, the biggest change to it in over a decade, which started landing in the US in May with no UK date attached. These Sharp sets will ship with the familiar app grid you already know.
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