Philips OLED TVs dump the darkness and follow LG with Dolby Vision Filmmaker Mode

Philips OLED809 with Top Gun Maverick on screen

(Image credit: Future)

One of the biggest selling points of LG's best 2024 OLED TVs is Dolby Vision Filmmaker Mode, a world first – the standard was only recently finalized by the UHD Alliance and LG was the first manufacturer to implement it. Only now, there's a second manufacturer embracing the standard: Philips.

The new feature is in all of Philips' 2024 OLEDs, according to FlatpanelsHD, who asked Philips whether it was in more models than just the Philips OLED809 TV. Philips said that yes, it's been working closely with Dolby and the mode will be available in all 2024 Philips OLED TVs as well as coming to 2023 OLED TVs from the firm.

Why Filmmaker Mode matters (and why it took so long to reach Dolby Vision HDR)

Filmmaker Mode is, as the name suggests, designed to show you movies as the filmmakers intended them to look. It was developed because many movie-makers were pretty unhappy with how their movies looked on smart TVs, especially when they were presented with crappy color accuracy and overly aggressive motion smoothing. Filmmaker mode turns off the toys and focuses – pun fully intended – on the film.

You may like

Filmmaker Mode is already a familiar sight in many of the best TVs, because it's been a key selling point for movie buffs since it was launched four years ago. But it wasn't available in Dolby Vision HDR until this year. That's partly because many Dolby Vision IQ presets use the very techniques that Filmmaker Mode was made to fight against.

That means if you already had your TV set to Filmmaker Mode but switched to a Dolby HDR title, your TV would turn off Filmmaker Mode and go into a Dolby Vision preset such as Dark or Normal instead. Now it's here that won't happen, and it should mean much more accurate reproduction of movies not just from sources such as Blu-Ray but also from the best streaming services that support Dolby Vision HDR.

We've already tested the HDR Filmmaker Mode in our review of the LG G4 and found it very impressive – it's a key part of what makes the LG G4 one of the best TVs our reviewer had ever laid eyes on. So it's great to see the same option coming to more TVs, and no doubt we'll be hearing similar announcements from more manufacturers soon.

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than a dozen books. Her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, is on sale now and her next book, about pop music, is out in 2025. She is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.