Philips 65PUS8807 (The One)
Philips calls it ‘The One’ – but we’re not so sure
Philips ‘The One’ TVS are models picked out to represent what the brand considers to be the most all-round attractive combination of price, features and performance in its latest TV range. This year the honour goes to the PUS8807 range, which features Ambilight tech, the impressive P5 picture processing engine and smart build quality. Yet the 65in model we are looking at here costs just £899.
The Philips 65PUS8807 is a sharp looker for its price. Its crisp silvery bodywork looks and feels more premium than most similarly priced rivals, and the way the TV rests on a centrally mounted, heavy-duty stand means you don’t need a particularly wide bit of furniture to place it on.
Ambilight finds LED lights arranged along the rear of its top, left and right edges casting out pools of light from around the TV that can be set to either a single colour ambience or to track the colour content of the pictures you’re watching. The accuracy and positioning of Ambilight’s colours is pretty uncanny and immersive, extending the viewing experience beyond the screen.
The TV is built around a VA type panel, and illuminated by a direct LED system (where the lights are positioned behind the screen). Two of the 65PUS8807’S four HDMI ports can handle 4K/120HZ gaming signals, as well as VRR and ALLM. There is support for Dolby Vision gaming up to 60Hz, plus you can optimise gaming performance via HGIG, where set-up screens on your console enable it to determine the best HDR output for the TV.
Smart features are provided by version 11 of Android TV, and the implementation of it here is slick and stable. All of the main HDR formats, HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are supported. While many TVS support two or three of these formats, it is still relatively rare to find a brand doing the consumer a favour by tackling all four.
Picture processing is provided by a fifth-generation version of Philips’ P5 engine, which is built around the principle that there are five key elements to TV picture quality (contrast, colour, motion, sharpness and source detection) that can be individually improved by processing tweaks applied in an optimal order.
Weird, not wonderful
After the consistent excellence of Philips’ OLED TVS, we had high hopes for this LCD set. Especially as it has been picked out by Philips as ‘The One’ for 2022. Sadly, though, the 65PUS8807’S picture performance is best summed up as a bit weird – and not in a wonderful sort of way.
Using its out of the box picture presets, its pictures are at times among the least natural and most processed-looking images we have seen. For starters, black levels look extremely forced. Yes, they do look darker, blacker, and less greyed-over than you might expect at this price, but the trade off is that really distracting amounts of subtle detailing end up getting crushed out of the picture, leaving dark areas looking hollow, empty and overpowering. Especially, unexpectedly, if you are watching a Dolby Vision source.
Even the Dolby Vision Bright preset can’t overcome this issue, while the Dolby Vision Dark mode film fans typically like to use, as it gives the most accurate images, looks so overpoweringly dark here that it can sometimes become hard to make out what’s going on. This is very strange indeed considering that Dolby Vision can normally be expected to help a TV deliver a more controlled and dynamic picture.
The light controls Philips is using to achieve such dark blacks on the 65PUS8807 can also become distractingly obvious at times, thanks to the way the baseline black-level depth can shift and jump within a shot or scene as bright objects move in and out of the frame.
The 65PUS8807’S colours are peculiar, too. Shading can look strangely coarse during dark scenes, with obvious striping in areas that should contain fine blends and a rather plasticky look to skin tones. There is noticeably more colour noise in our favourite test movies than we are used to seeing, too, and some tones just look flat-out wrong. The trees outside Georgie’s house at the start of It, for instance, look brown rather than the muted green you should see, and colours generally during this opening sequence look inconsistent. Greens can look over the top with the TV’S Natural or Vivid picture presets, yet if you switch to the gentler Movie mode the whole picture looks rather washed out and biased towards yellow. Thankfully there are options in the sprawling set-up menus that can help a bit. Setting the HDR Premium mode to Medium rather than Low/off suddenly brings in much more skin tone detail, for instance, while pushing up the Black Level setting to around its 65 mark for Dolby Vision and around its 58 mark with HDR10 can start to reintroduce some of the lost shadow detailing and reduce colour coarseness.
These fixes do have negative side effects, such as less inky black levels, the appearance of multiple areas of backlight clouding, and more ‘clipping’ (subtle shading loss) in bright highlights of HDR pictures. But at least these distractions are less debilitating than the ones associated with the 65PUS8807’S default settings.
More positively, the screen gets quite bright for such an affordable TV, and bright scenes seem much less affected by the sort of colour and lost detail issues associated with dark scenes. The difference in quality between bright and dark footage is one of the starkest we have seen, in fact.
Pictures are also extremely sharp and detailed. This is especially true with native 4K images, but the set upscales HD images quite aggressively too. Even after they have been tweaked to get around the worst issues, though, in truth the 65PUS8807’S pictures never feel natural and balanced enough to class as better than average. Which is definitely not the sort of standard we usually associate with a Philips TV.
“There is noticeably more colour noise in our favourite test movies than we are used to seeing, and some tones just look flat-out wrong”
Busy and involving soundstage
The 65PUS8807 supports Dolby Atmos playback and a 2 x full-range speaker arrangement driven by 10 watts of amplification, bolstered by Dolby Bass enhancement, Room Calibration and DTS Play-fi wireless speaker network features. Its sound quality, though, falls well short of the heights achieved by Philips’ OLED TVS. The sound isn’t loud or well projected enough to deliver a really satisfying movie experience, and action-movie mixes sound as if they are struggling to get out. There is also a slightly low-fidelity and harsh feel to some of the higher sound effects a mix may contain, while sustained heavy bass effects cause the speakers to succumb to some distracting phutting and crackling.
On a more positive note, dialogue is clean and seems to be coming from the actors’ mouths on the screen rather than somewhere below it, while other effects tend to be presented with good clarity and a moderate sense of steered Dolby Atmos effect placement, helping the soundstage typically sound busy and involving.
While its out-of-the-box pictures are improvable via some of the set-up options, they are never free enough of flaws to hit the standards we usually associate with Philips. It manages to perform well enough for its money, but we are struggling to agree with Philips that this is really ‘The One’ to recommend from its latest TV range.