Philips OLED760 (65OLED760) review

You know what they say about OLED TVs: you wait your whole life for a cheap one to come along, and then two arrive at once.

So, hot on the heels of our review of Toshiba’s XF9F OLED TV, we have Philips’s take on the budget OLED, the OLED760.

It currently costs just a little more than the Toshiba model, but the OLED760 is still remarkably affordable for an OLED. It also boasts better specs and fancy Ambilight, and is, perhaps crucially, the product of a brand with almost a decade of experience in the OLED TV game.

So, can it succeed where the Toshiba struggled?

Price

The 65-inch Philips OLED760 launched at an impressively low price of £1499, but its current £1099 asking price makes it potentially one of the year’s biggest TV bargains.

OLED TVs – especially those equipped, as the OLED760 is, with an eye-catching supporting cast of Ambilight technology and strong gaming support – just aren’t supposed to be this cheap. Yet here we are.

Not surprisingly, the other screen sizes of the OLED760 keep the value flag flying, with the 55-inch costing £899 and the 77-inch costing £1599.

Philips’s website lists a 48-inch OLED760 model as well, but at the time of writing, we couldn’t find anywhere in the UK selling this model. Philips OLEDs unfortunately aren’t available in the US or Australia.

Cheap though it is by OLED standards, the Philips OLED760 can, remarkably, be beaten for price, with the recently reviewed Toshiba XF9F OLED currently available for just £999 in 65-inch form.

The cheapest 65-inch OLEDs from more established brands such as Samsung and LG, meanwhile, start at around £1500.

Design

Far from being the lump of boring plastic we would expect such a budget-conscious OLED to look like, the OLED760 is actually rather glamorous. It combines a remarkably narrow, premium-feeling black screen trim with a chassis so slim at the outer edges that it gives your credit card a run for its money.

The TV does bulk out a fair bit over its more central rear portion – all of its connections, processing, speakers and the like have to go somewhere, after all – but you won’t notice this chunkier bit unless you’ve hung the TV on the wall or you’re watching it from a really severe angle.

Even the little blade-style feet supplied with the screen enjoy a quite premium ‘satin chrome’ finish.

Then there’s the OLED760’s most eye-catching claim to design fame: its three-sided take on Philips’ Ambilight technology.

This, if you’ve somehow never come across Ambilight before, uses an array of LEDs arranged down the back of the screen’s left, right and top edges to produce a pool of coloured light on the wall behind and around the TV.

This pool of light can be purely ambient, set to a colour of your choice, or set to have the LEDs constantly mirror both the tone and the position of specific colours of what you’re watching.

We realise Ambilight perhaps sounds a bit much when just described in writing like this, but while we would advise toning down Ambilight’s brightness and responsiveness from its default settings, it really can enhance the viewing experience. As well as making for a fun dinner party talking point.

Features

You would expect a £1099 65-inch OLED TV to be stripped back to the bare bones in terms of features. The OLED760, though, is having none of that.

Gamers will be delighted, for starters, to find the set capable of supporting 4K/120Hz feeds, complete with VRR in the generic, AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync formats. Even more impressively, these features are supported across all four of the TV’s HDMI sockets, rather than being limited to just a couple.

When the TV’s receiving a game source, you can call up a dedicated game menu that shows both information on the incoming game feed and a small selection of gaming aids.

The screen takes just 13.1ms to render 60Hz graphics in its Game preset, too – and that drops to only around 6ms with 120Hz sources. There’s even a special Game Mode setting for the Ambilight system.

The OLED760 can also play all four of the current TV HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. In other words, it will take in the best version of any content you feed it.

A Filmmaker Mode is provided for AV fans looking for an instantly accurate picture mode, though there’s also extensive Calman calibration support if you want to pay for a professional calibrator to come in and further optimise the set.

The OLED760 even retains a version of Philips’ P5 AI Perfect Picture Engine processor.

This isn’t the latest, most powerful, most feature-packed version of this processor, but it still has elements working on the core five aspects of picture quality referred to in the ‘P5’ part of its name: colour, contrast, sharpness, motion and source detection/recognition. This means it’s still got way more about it than the processing systems found on most high-value TVs.

Smart features are provided by the relatively new Titan OS platform. This isn’t the most dazzlingly presented smart service around, but it does carry the vast majority of the streaming services most UK TV buyers will want, including Disney+, Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video and BBC iPlayer.

In fact, it even carries the new Freely service, via which you can live stream (as opposed to receive through an aerial) most of the channels found on the Freeview HD terrestrial broadcast service, and enjoy subscription-free access to tens of thousands of hours of on-demand content.

Bluetooth 5.2 and Apple AirPlay are built in, too, and it also works with both Apple Home and Google Home, while Amazon Alexa voice control is built in and accessed via a microphone built into the remote control. The one major app that isn’t available during testing is Apple TV – but you can these days access Apple TV content through the Prime Video app, albeit at a lower bitrate (and therefore quality).

While the OLED760’s 2 x 10W sound system isn’t the result of one of Philips’s collaborations with audio brand Bowers & Wilkins, the set still supports playback of both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks, as well as providing a few handy audio features including bass enhancement, dialogue enhancement, room calibration, a graphic equaliser, a night mode, and even the option to establish specific individual hearing profiles.

In these days when all OLED panels are very much not equal, we need to wrap this section up by stressing that the panel inside the OLED760 does not boast the MLA, ‘Evo’, Quantum Dot or Primary RGB Tandem technologies found in various of today’s mid-range and premium OLED TVs.

Instead, it’s a basic OLED panel without any significant brightness-boosting or colour volume-enhancing tricks up its sleeve (beyond anything Philips’ P5 processor can bring to the table). Even a pretty basic OLED panel still has the potential to rock the mid-range TV world, though…

Picture quality

While the OLED760’s pictures don’t hit the same HDR-hungry heights that the premium likes of the LG G5, Samsung S95F and Panasonic Z95B do, they’re anything but a disappointment for the set’s money.

But let’s get the downers, such as they are, out of the way first. The most obvious one is that the OLED760 isn’t nearly as bright as this year’s top-level OLEDs are. This applies both to full-screen bright HDR content (which looks to be around half as bright as this year’s boldest OLED performers) and the intensity of small bright peaks.

Motion is also less assured here than it is on Philips’ more premium TVs these days. Judder with 24p film sources is a bit stark with no motion processing active, but then some motion settings leave images looking a little soft and blurry, while others that clean this softness up push too far in the other direction, leaving motion feeling too fluid to still feel natural.

While we never quite find a perfect solution for the screen’s slight motion niggles, though, the brightness issue is really just part and parcel of equipping the OLED760 with an OLED panel affordable enough to hit its budget-conscious retail price. And it comes with plenty of healthy mitigating factors in tow.

For instance, since the OLED760 naturally retains OLED’s unique ability to have each and every self-emissive pixel produce its own light and colour independently of even its closest neighbours, local contrast is still super-impressive compared with any LCD TVs available for the same sort of money.

The OLED760 can, after all, produce an image’s deepest black pixels right alongside its brightest whites, contributing to a degree of contrast and intensity that provides more than ample compensation for the screen’s relatively limited core brightness.

Those deepest black pixels really are black, too, revealing none of the greyness that you get to some degree with even the strongest mid-range LCD TVs.

Nor is there any instability in the OLED760’s portrayal of dark scenes; baseline brightness levels always look rock solid, even with dark shots that contain multiple subtle shifts in their overall light balance.

Plus, of course, since this is OLED technology, there’s no backlight clouding or blooming to worry about.

The OLED760 improves over its predecessors in Philips’ TV range by also managing to reveal impressive amounts of shadow detail in even the darkest image corners.

We don’t find ourselves troubled, either, by any major green or mauve undertones while watching dark scenes, even when watching the screen from a wide angle. In fact, watching the OLED760 from an angle merely reminds us of OLED’s innate advantage in this area over the vast majority of LCD TVs.

The exquisite degree of light control the OLED760 provides, albeit within a constrained light range, feeds into its colour performance. There’s never any trouble with significant colour striping or posterisation with HDR feeds, and shading even in the most vibrant areas remains present enough to avoid the flat and cartoonish look such areas can exhibit with lesser TVs.

Philips has very much learned over recent years how to cater for a range of picture quality tastes, and this underrated talent continues even with a TV as affordable as the OLED760.

A Filmmaker Mode is provided and works very nicely for people who want an accurate but relatively flat, ‘laid back’ picture that thrives on subtlety and nuance. Philips’s default Crystal Clear setting, though, is also on hand to deliver an eye-catching demonstration of how intense and vibrant the OLED760 can look, despite the OLED panel’s limited brightness.

While this default setting initially feels a bit too strong and aggressive, especially if you’ve watched the Filmmaker Mode first, it’s surprising how much its extra vibrancy starts to grow on you as you tune into it. Especially as it’s actually much more consistent, balanced, nuanced and faithful to the feel of the original source material than some of Philips’ previous default picture presets have been.

There’s a relatively simple way to take the edge off this mode’s most aggressive instincts, too, if you really can’t tune into them, in the shape of a Colour Content Adaptation setting. Just switching this to Balanced from its default (in Crystal Clear Mode) Vibrant setting can calm the picture down without losing too much of that enjoyable extra brightness and punch that the Crystal Clear mode is designed to provide.

It’s worth adding, too, that the OLED760 provides an HDR Movie preset that gives you (with minimal tinkering) an image that feels nicely positioned between the relatively dark, subdued Filmmaker Mode and the exuberance of the Crystal Clear mode.

The OLED760 effortlessly adapts its talent for subtlety and finesse to SDR content too, as well as, finally, delivering a crisp, clean, responsive gaming performance that’s way better than we’d expect from such an affordable 65-inch OLED TV. Not least because it also largely avoids (especially with 120Hz sources) the slight motion inconsistencies and flaws noted during video playback.

Sound quality

The OLED760’s trend of punching above its price weight continues with its audio. It can get surprisingly loud for a TV with such a thin (at the outer edges, anyway) chassis, but at the same time, it manages to retain excellent levels of detail and clarity even when pushed to volume levels that would have many TVs’ speakers crumbling.

These details are well placed, too, creating an effective sense of 3D space with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X mixes that includes making dialogue sound locked to the screen.

The sound also projects forward quite nicely, and there’s nothing harsh or thin about even the most trebly details. At the other end of the frequency spectrum, meanwhile, the OLED760 manages to deliver a pretty solid bass showing, despite the slenderness of so much of its bodywork.

The midrange sounds spacious too, with enough headroom to cope with substantial sound mix expansions during action scenes without starting to sound thin or boxed in.

The movie world’s most bonkers bass drops and sustained rumbles can instigate a little humming interference from the TV’s chassis, and/or cause the stereo drivers to succumb to some minor and short-lived booming interference.

The auto calibration system doesn't make as much difference to the TV’s sound profile as we would like, and we also find we have to add an audio delay of around 30ms to our sources to stop the OLED760 suffering from the occasional lip-sync slippage.

Overall, though, as with its pictures, the OLED760’s audio strengths easily overwhelm its weaknesses – though, as ever, a dedicated sound system is highly recommended.

Verdict

While we’ve seen one or two previous OLED TVs venture down into the same sort of price territory the OLED760 occupies, no similarly affordable 65-inch OLED TV before it has delivered anything like the same level of features and performance that this Philips set does.

As such, it’s a potential value-driven game changer, the likes of which we were starting to think the OLED TV world would never give us.

SCORES

• Picture 5
• Sound 4
• Features 5

MORE:

Read our review of the TCL 65C7K

Also consider the LG OLED55C5

Read our Samsung S90F review

Best OLED TVs: the 3 Award-winning sets our experts recommend