When it comes to premium TVs, the magic comes when you feel totally immersed in what’s happening on-screen, whether that’s for a movie, watching sport, or catching up with TV shows. But it’s not just about what’s happening on-screen – for real immersion, it’s about what’s happening around the screen too, and how the sound envelops you.
Philips TVs are built around giving you the most immersive home cinema experience possible, using unique technologies and designs you won’t find anywhere else. From Philips TVs’ affordable LED 4K TV options up to its most mind-blowing next-gen OLED TV, you’ll find most of these technologies across all of them, available in a range of sizes. In combination, they make Philips TVs such excellent value, and can even mean you don’t have to make the difficult choice between better picture quality and a TV that feels larger, or sounds better – you can have it all.
1. Ambilight
Unique to Philips TVs is Ambilight, which uses coloured LEDs around the edge of the TV’s frame to spread light precisely matching what’s on-screen onto the wall around the set. If you’re watching stylish sci-fi, neon lights spill out of frame and in a halo on your wall, creating a massive sense of scale and ambiance. In nature documentaries, the hues of the sky and lush landscapes fill your vision far beyond what the edges of the screen contain. The new generation of Ambilight found on Philips TVs’ premium sets today matches what’s happening more precisely than ever, reacting instantly to changes in the visuals, and with clear distinctions where one colour ends and another begins, just as you find on the TV panel itself.
The most immediately obvious advantage of this is how it makes the screen feel bigger. If you’re on a strict budget when buying a TV, you may have to choose between a larger screen or a better picture. With an Ambilight TV, you can get the better picture quality and the impression of a bigger size, with the TV filling your vision in the way that you want from a home cinema screen, no matter whether you’re buying at 43 inches or 77 inches.
Ambilight has other advantages too. First, it helps reduce eye strain to have ambient light behind the screen, but here this ambient light not only isn’t detracting from what’s on-screen, it’s actually adding to the experience. Secondly, Ambilight improves the way you perceive the contrast on the TV, elevating how even OLED handles the difference between light and dark.
When your vision is just filled with the colours of the screen, it feels like you’re getting that cinema experience of a colossal floating display – but it’s coming from a reasonably sized, practical TV. It makes everything you watch feel bigger and more engaging, from romance to action to reality to sport; one reason why Ambilight TV chose to sponsor Barcelona FC.
2. P5 processor
We mentioned above that the scale of Ambilight can free you to invest in better picture quality, and the 7th-generation P5 AI picture processor at the heart of Philips 2023 premium TVs is crucial to that. The P5 AI processor is designed to focus on the most important five areas of image quality: colour, contrast, resolution, motion, and source quality. It’s designed to enhance all of these from their original digital version (which, in the age of streaming, will often be compressed or not at the highest quality it could be), and to make them look lifelike, natural and incredibly clear.
The latest generation of the P5 AI processor features a range of enhancements to achieve this more convincingly than ever, including a new Super Resolution feature – this is designed to sharpen the main part of an image without losing fine, natural detail – and an Ambient Intelligence V2 feature, which tweaks the image processing based on the precise tint of ambient light in the room, so it will always be optimised for your individual viewing conditions.
3. Better HDR support
HDR has been one of the great modern additions to TVs, offering contrast and colours that look closer to real life. But there are two main versions of the most advanced kind of HDR – HDR10+ and Dolby Vision – and far too many premium TVs only support one… but Philips TVs support both of them.
On a premium Philips TV, whether that’s OLED, mini-LED or standard LED, you’ll know you’re always seeing the picture in the best HDR version it can be.
4. Better sound
Sound quality is an afterthought for too many TVs today, but it’s so important to the feeling of immersion when watching. Philips TVs put emphasis on great audio quality out of the box, not just in terms of detail and clarity, but also with the power that movies are designed around, and that makes sporting occasions come alive. The Philips OLED808 OLED TV, for example, features a 2.1-channel system with 70W of power, which is higher than you get from most equivalent TVs. You’ve got five speaker drivers in total, including a rear subwoofer, to deliver excellent dynamic range for the price.
But if you want more, the Philips OLED+908 features an even more powerful Dolby Atmos system designed by Bowers & Wilkins. Three individual speakers across the front – each featuring dual-drivers – are isolated so they don’t interfere with each other’s accuracy and detail, deliver astoundingly rich and involving sound without the need for a soundbar. There’s a built-in subwoofer, but you can add a separate, full-size sub if you want to take the experience up another level.
5. Class-leading OLED
The above features can be found on all of Philips TVs’’ premium sets, from the Philips PUS8808 ‘The One’ LED 4K TV, to the Philips PML9308 ‘The Xtra’ mini-LED TV, to the Philips OLED808 and Philips OLED+908.
But if you’re looking for the ultimate in immersion, then you’ll be interested in the advanced OLED screens used for the Philips OLED808 and OLED+908.
The OLED808 uses a latest-gen OLED_Ex panel that’s capable of hitting 1,000 nits of brightness – this is especially high for a mid-range OLED TV, providing an even more stunning range of contrast than we expect from an OLED at this price, and giving colours more pop and vibrance, while still keeping them realistic.
The Philips OLED+908 takes this to a new peak, however. It uses a cutting-edge META Micro Lens Array OLED panel, which means that billions of tiny lenses are used to focus the light from the pixels right to your eyes, delivering a class-leading 2,100 nits of brightness. Yes, that’s around double what a good standard OLED set can deliver, and that’s already a fantastic screen. The difference that this makes is immediately visible, and is something you can’t go back from once you’ve tried it. Lights in a night time cityscape are clearer and sharper, more like what your eye sees at night. Colours are richer and more natural. White tones are cleaner and lift out of the screen better. And the overall increase in brightness (plus a special anti-reflective panel) means that the TV is more visible in brighter rooms, making it a dream OLED TV for sport for daytime viewing, as well as a dimmed-lights movie night.
In combination, the features of Philips TVs makes them unbeatable when it comes to creating that sought-after immersive home cinema setup. But without the need for custom lighting, a sound system or other add-ons – you can simply choose a TV, in whatever size or budget range you want, and know that it will feel huge, look premium, and sound enveloping.
For more information, please visit: www.philips.com/tv
