Philips 65OLED935
Philips’s latest OLED TV features an integrated B&W soundbar, but does this slice of AV convenience offer the best of both worlds?
Combining a television with an integrated soundbar may be the height of convenience, but unless that soundbar is top quality, you’re stuck with it. The Philips 65OLED935 is a sleek, powerful television that aims to get around this pitfall by having hi-fi specialist Bowers & Wilkins design the speaker system.
This isn’t Philips’s first TV and soundbar combination. Its predecessor, the OLED934, also had a Bowers bar built into a stand. This time it has a more modest price, with the 3.1.2ch Dolby Atmos soundbar making this a tempting AV solution for those who like to keep things simple and clean on the eye.
But to describe the Philips 65OLED935 in those terms is doing it a disservice. Beneath that steel exterior, there is a TV with impressive specs that could even outperform its soundbar-less sibling, the five-star-rated 65OLED805. With a dual AI engine inside its top-of-the-line P5 processor, Philips is confident enough to describe the 935’s performance as OLED+.
Tidy sums
The Philips OLED935 comes with two chrome brackets in the box, one for wall-mounting the other to use as a stand. A cable tidying system means that the join between the soundbar and the TV itself is seamless. The stand needs a surface at least 88cm wide and 26cm deep to accommodate it.
There’s little to no bezel, just an even 2mm metal bead around the edge of the glass. On the back of the panel, you’ll find four HDMI sockets, including ARC. ALLM is the sole HDMI 2.1 feature here, meaning that this set may not be the best choice for gamers. There’s an optical audio-out, ports for headphones and an external subwoofer plus two USB slots. It is Bluetooth-enabled for audio, too.
The soundbar houses ten separate drive units. There are two 5cm midrange cones plus a 19mm titanium-dome tweeter for the centre channel, one of the same cones and tweeters each for the left and right, and a single racetrack-style 10cm x 6.5cm subwoofer unit on the top surface, ported to the rear. Also along that top edge are the two 5cm height speakers for that Dolby Atmos sound.
The tweeters are decoupled from the main enclosure, with the centre one in B&W’S tweeter-on-top style. The enclosure itself is made from glassfibrereinforced polycarbonate ABS, braced with internal rib sections to control resonance. The remote control is backed in Muirhead leather – it feels the part for a premium OLED TV, but isn’t particularly intuitive or user-friendly.
The benefit of the Android OS is that all the UK catch-up services are present, along with Disney+, Amazon Prime and Netflix. There’s no Apple TV or Apple Music, so you’ll need to add an Amazon Fire TV Stick, Apple TV or other media streamer. Film and TV options include Rakuten and Google Play Movies & TV.
In terms of picture performance, the OLED935 gets one or two boosts over the soundbar-less OLED805 thanks to the improved Philips P5 processor with its AI dual picture engine. The big one is AI Machine Learn Sharpness, a tool that enhances the textures and patterns of specific parts of the image. Another is AI Smart Bit Enhanced 2.0, which removes colour banding without the loss of detail. There’s also Perfect Natural Reality processing, which makes standard-def material look more like Full HD.
On the sound front, the big news is the 3.1.2 speaker arrangement, Dolby Atmos support and the involvement of hi-fi specialist Bowers & Wilkins. The TV is also compatible with the DTS Play-fi hi-res streaming standard, meaning you can set-up your soundbar to work as part of a multi-room system along with any other Play-fi-enabled kit you might own.
This wouldn’t be a top-end Philips TV review without Ambilight. The company’s rear-firing LED lightshow comes in its four-sided variety for the OLED935 and remains a great feature.
The Philips 65OLED935 supports both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ alongside HDR10 and HLG. We see what it makes of the first of these by slotting Spiderman: Homecoming into our Blu-ray player and the results are impressive. Using the Dolby Vision Bright setting, the upgrades to the picture quality over the Philips OLED805 are small but clear. The Philips AI processing works alongside the Dolby metadata to make a brilliantly punchy and vivid HDR picture.
Textural differences
The spidey suit really pops against the nicely defined greys in the background, while the AI Machine Learn sharpening tech enhances the textural differences between the rough raw concrete slabs of the hangar entrance, without doing the same to the soft marbling of the polished floor. There’s a sense of colour precision to the hero’s mustard yellow backpack and the red and blue shades of his outfit.
All the same, we prefer the TV’S HDR AI preset, which is an excellent quick-fix solution for getting the most out of Dolby Vision films. This setting keeps things simple but leaves the user with the five main Philips processing modes to experiment with. The HDR Personal mode squeezes every last drop of the excellent picture performance from this TV. The OLED Contrast slider offers the best customisation. The higher you go, the more zing you add to the colours, but you lose a little depth to the picture.
At the film’s climax, there are some healthy levels of dark detail on show alongside some lusciously deep OLED blacks. We can still make out the folds and the feel of the material of the Vulture’s leather jacket. Those details are just shy of the best Led-backed TVS, but the trade-off for those blacks is worth it.
Philips has upped its motion processing game for its most recent TVS – it’s decent, but not quite in the same league as Sony and Panasonic. We’re happy to put up with some judder in the
faster panning shots in order to avoid the soap-opera aesthetic, but that decision is harder when watching SDR. Viewing the opening scenes of Jack Reacher in Full HD on Blu-ray, the overhead shot of the riverside crime scene is excellently handled. There’s a good feel to the paving stones, a believable colour palette to the flowerbeds and plenty of dark detail as the SWAT team arrives. For SDR, it has a remarkably punchy look.
Our expectations of TV sound are usually tempered, but here things are different. There are small picture quality advantages of the OLED935 over the OLED805, but the integrated soundbar makes up most of the difference in price.
We watch the bombing raid sequence of Unbroken in Dolby Atmos and the B&W soundbar projects an excellent soundstage, adding plenty of height and breadth to the sound. Even with our eyes closed, it’s easy to picture the planes flying across the screen and the bullets zipping by. The agility of the drivers makes for a good separation of the effects, unveiling all the details in the clicks and clinks of the military equipment, and the creaks of the pilots’ leather jackets.
But clarity is by no means everything when it comes to great TV sound and this set-up is missing one of the most crucial ingredients – excitement. Dynamically, there is little difference in scale between the sounds, both for effects and soundtrack, which makes everything feel flat and devoid of impact on the senses. We hear the bombers fly over our heads, but we’ve no urge to duck. Bullets offer little threat, even as the cockpit is riddled with bullet holes.
Similarly, voices lack expression, which sells short the tension of the sequence. The young servicemen seem all too relaxed on their mission deep into the heart of enemy territory, rocked by the lifeless pops of flack exploding just inches from their heads.
The audio is superior to the OLED805, but the results are less enthralling than those of even an affordable soundbar, such as the Sonos Beam. Compared with a more expensive Dolby Atmossupporting soundbar, such as the Sonos Arc, the contrast is even less flattering.
Philips has done a superb job to improve on what was already a first-class picture performance. It is sharp and colourful with deep blacks and a great level of detail – but you can get almost all that with the more affordable OLED805. With the price gap this wide, there’s a case for choosing the OLED805 and investing in a dedicated soundbar. The OLED935 may be a more elegant solution and a step up in picture quality but, currently, it comes at too high a premium.