Amazon Echo Show 8 review: Alexa is getting even better

When I say Amazon Echo show eight, what's your first thought? If it's there's already eight of these. I totally get it. No, this is actually only the fourth smart display from Amazon. It just has an eight inch screen. So we want to see if this is worth your money and comments base. Let's open it up. [MUSIC] The box slips I guess Mighty boxes. Let's get this paper off and you can actually get a look at the device. So yeah, it looks like it's actually decently sized 8 inches sounds small but it's a bit bigger than like my iPhone for instance. Yeah, that's not bad, plus you get this nice camera shutter right here which is super nice from a privacy standpoint ,so you've got the nice rubber bottom to Keeping in place the standard hookups and back, plus you've got these volume buttons, the microphone, the mute button. If you don't want Alexa listening to you, it's basically what you'd expect. So now that we've got this thing on box Let's test this out. [MUSIC] The show is super easy to set up an intuitive to use. It equips that echoes voice assistant with video chatting and streaming cooking assistance in the kitchen, touch control for the smart home and plenty more. For $130 that Echo show a really does pack in a lot of useful. False marks. But non of that's really new. Check it out, what we're seeing here is Amazon rounding out their two main product lines, we smart speakers over here, we have smart displays on this side. In the past few months alone we have the brand new Amazon echo studio, the new Amazon echo and the echo dot with clock. And over here we have the echo show five and the echo show eight. Okay, if you're seeing a pattern then you should be basically on both sides you have the Papa Bear, mama bear and baby bear and Amazon is really hoping that one of these products is going to be just right for you. The eight inch screen size falls right between the 10.1 inch and the 5.5 inch of the show and show five but it has the higher resolution of its big brother here at 1280 by 800 pixels. That's not mind blowing, but it's not bad either, especially for the price, and it's much better than the Show 5 low def display. But sound wise, how does it compare to its Echo Show counterparts? Well take a listen. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [MUSIC] The difference in sound quality makes sense given the different sizes of these three devices. The Echo 8 sounds much fuller than the Echo Show 5 but it's not quite as powerful or as dynamic as the ten inch model here. Now that said if you have it at a medium volume, it's pretty good. When you push up that volume, it starts getting a little bit buzzy and it can't quite stand up to the dynamic range of a better speaker or a stronger display like this. [MUSIC] So as we've seen the show eight \g is much better and Audio and visual fidelity is in the show five, making it seem much more comparable to the 10 inch $230 show. Except for the camera. Both the Echo Show 5 and this Echo Show 8 have a one megapixel camera. Now the 10 inch echo show As a five megapixel camera. When I first heard that I thought that it was gonna make a really big difference when it came to video chatting. But once I set up this video chat with myself to compare the images, I actually saw that this image right. Right here on the echo show eight which is captured by the better five megapixel camera is much more pixellated than this image here which is captured by the one megapixel camera. I was surprised but it does kind of make sense given that there are some. So many factors like network speed and so on that go into the quality of the image that shows up when you're doing video chatting. So the bottom line is this $100 more for a five megapixel camera isn't necessarily going to translate to better video chat image quality. All of this is leaving me feeling a little bit [UNKNOWN] Torn. That' because this device doesn't really have a new new feature so it's totally redundant. It's iteration for the sake of iteration. The Echo Show 8 is the same old echo with different measurements. Okay, that maybe true but Look at that echo show 5. It's basically a glorified smart alarm clock. I mean, it's the size of my iPhone propped up on a countertop. And the 10 inch echo show is nice, but it's also $100 more expensive than this echo show 8. I really do think that this device right here might be Amazon's best smart display for the price. Do you know why this device costs $100 less than the 10 inch echo show? It's because that one has a five megapixel camera and this one has a garbage one megapixel camera. I mean did Amazon have to go digging in their basement to find a decade old camera. Just to put on this brand new device, I mean the video chat quality is much at best. Okay, that may be the case but you know for video chatting, cameras don't have to be that good. Maybe one megapixel is all we need because video chat quality is always kind of smudgy and besides the $130 seven inch Google Nest Hub doesn't even have a camera. Yeah, but the Nest Hub at least has good Smart Home controls. It has better cooking assistance and a better user interface. Okay, but this display actually has some really nice perks going for it. I like the sunrise alarms. And also it has that nice physical camera shutter. From a privacy standpoint, I like the idea that I can look at this and I don't have to trust Facebook. I don't have to trust Google. I don't have to trust Amazon, in this case. I look right there and I know a 100% that that camera is covered and nobody is watching me. Well, nobody wants to watch you anyway. So, whatever. But listen, on this device, you can't even use voice commands [UNKNOWN] Pull up YouTube videos on a smart display. I mean, look, it's a fine product overall, but everything that it does has been done before. All right enough arguing, forget the history of Amazon product, would you buy the echo show eight Over the 10 inch echo and the echo show five. Now I picked the echo show five. I think that it would look better on my nightstand. And, you know, maybe I would actually take the echo show that's $230 because it actually has a decent camera. So yeah. [MUSIC]