When it comes to TV design, Philips has an almost unfair advantage. After all, no other brand offers Ambilight, where the screen’s rear edges are fitted with LED lights able to cast colourful auras that can accurately match the tones and variations of the pictures you’re watching. It's a longrunning USP, and one that we're routinely impressed by.
With Philips’ 55in 55PUS8601, a four-sided Ambilight system is just the start of its design charms. It also graces the flatscreen catwalk with an incredibly thin frame and slim rear (off its stand it measures less than 17mm deep), and is dressed in a slick combination of deep black and dark chrome details. And best of all it delivers its audio via a pair of tidy-looking metallic speakers that attach magnetically to the bezel's edges. These can also be slotted – wirelessly – into separate, optional floorstands.
The speakers, slender and chrome-finished, carry 18 drivers claimed to pump out 50W of forward-firing sonics. The external floor mounts for these boost the power, adding more bass and mid-range capacity.
Posh and specs
The posh feel created by the 55PUS8601’s design is backed up by its picture specifications and features. It’s a 4K UHD TV (natch), and will also play High Dynamic Range (HDR) content following a firmware update later this year. The edge LED lighting system features Philips’ BrightPro technology, which divides pictures into more than 6,000 zones for accurate analysis and localised control.
The screen is rated as being capable of delivering a high 700 nits of brightness, which should serve its HDR ambitions well, especially as the 55PUS8601 also claims a dynamic contrast ratio of 500,000:1. Mind you, even this level of specification doesn’t meet the requirements of the recently announced Ultra HD Premium ‘standard’.
Pictures are driven by Philips’ top-level Perfect Pixel Ultra HD processing suite. Among the headline tricks of this comprehensive image engine are a motion compensation setup that emulates an 1,800Hz refresh rate; a new noise reduction system that works to eliminate noise from sources without causing blurring or smearing side effects; and a colour processing tool to upconvert 8-bit sources for smooth blends and shifts. The set carries enough calibration niceties to earn itself ISF certification, with two ISF preset slots provided.
The 55PUS8601’s smart system is a fairly premium affair, built around Google’s Android TV platform. I’m not actually a huge fan of Android TV, finding its lack of customisation and excessive app numbers running counter to the sort of slick, stripped-back interface I want. And at the time of writing, Philips' on-demand content options were on the sparse side; the ITV Player, All 4 and Demand 5 were all MIA. So was Amazon Video, but this is promised as an update. The Netflix client is 4K-enabled and BBC apps are present. Google Play Movies provides another avenue. And Philips’ implementation of Android TV runs more stably than the one Sony has integrated into its TVs.
Space invaders
Looking past the TV's extravagant exterior to the pictures within, while they have their moments, they don’t set the world alight as much as I’d hoped.
Sandra Bullock is a regular visitor to my demo room. Sort of. The sequences of her spinning in space in Gravity can help prove the mettle of a TV's illumination/black level talents, so I always have that BD on standby. And with the 55PUS8601 I failed to find the black level depth buyers have come to expect from the best edge LED TVs these days. The supposedly inky blackness of space is muted, grey-tinged. This makes it hard to fully engage with the action.
This Gravity moment, with its white-suited astronaut at the centre of a mostly black screen, also reveals some areas of backlight clouding/unevenness on the Philips. This is more noticeable if you use the TV’s Movie preset, which essentially turns off most of the video processing.
Reduce the screen's backlight output and you can minimise the clouding and limit the sense of greyness over dark areas. But you’ve then lost much of the brightness that’s one of the TV’s key selling points. And once the HDR update comes along, ripping luminance out of the image will be even less of a desired option.
There's a Contrast Mode that can improve black depth if you choose its Best For Picture option, but unfortunately this feature tends to make dark scenes look quite unstable due to its constantly fluctuating light levels.
With the TV set up to deliver what felt like the best black level/stability/brightness balance, the rich starscapes of Gravity lost some low-light details and gradation subtleties in the darkest areas.
Yet while contrast can be bettered elsewhere, the 55PUS8601 is capable of some really impressive picture moments, especially with native 4K sources. My stock UHD reels from The Life Of Pi and Exodus: Gods And Kings were little short of magnificent in many ways. Detail and sharpness levels are superlative – looking beyond 4K at times – and colours rendered with a degree of tonal subtlety that further underlines the screen’s inherently high resolution.
Moving on up
Philips’ long experience with motion processing plays out well with native 4K content. Crispness isn’t reduced when there’s lots of movement in the frame. I wouldn’t advise buyers to employ the highest level of the Perfect Natural Motion feature, as this throws up some enjoyment-sapping side effects, but the processing is definitely worth at least experimenting with on its mid and low settings. Even if you typically avoid such intelligent smoothing engines on principle.
The 55PUS8601 doesn’t upscale non-4K content particularly well, tending to either exaggerate source noise too much, or leaving pictures feeling a bit soft, depending on the exact settings you’ve got selected. Plus, colours look less natural and nuanced than they do with native 4K sources. With the latter, Life of Pi’s zoo and daytime sea sequences are painted with richness and dynamism (perhaps too much when the Colour Enhancement tool is activated).
Non-4K sources often seem a little cooked-up too. I spent an age experimenting with all the Perfect Pixel Ultra HD tools and options, but as well as this representing a level of eff ort beyond anything most people will want to get involved with when using a TV, my eff orts never resulted in a fully natural-looking non-4K picture.
There's no 3D functionality here. For most buyers this won't matter a jot, but genuine home cinema enthusiasts may think twice about investing in a set that cocks a snoot at a chunk of their disc library. They should also note that only one of the Philips' quartet of HDMI inputs is specified to support the HDCP 2.2 copy protection protocol.
The TV's innovative speakers are more consistently excellent than its images. These combine pleasing levels of detail with a lovely rounded tone for dialogue. There's, an expansive and open mid-range, plus enough power to hit high volumes without sounding strained. The forwardfi ring and side-mounted nature of the speakers makes the sound punchy and wide too, and while bass (delivered by a pair of rear-mounted woofers) doesn’t reach especially deep, there’s enough of it to stop the soundstage appearing thin.
While the Philips 55PUS8601 isn’t best-in-class, I'm always pleased to see the brand fl exing its muscles in the UK. This TV’s innovative design and bold features, including Ambilight, are a strong statement of intent. Future HDR support and better VOD app integration will strengthen its appeal further, and it has brightness and impact on its side.
VERDICT
Ambilight and detachable speakers make this one of the most striking 4K TVs around. Its pictures aren’t perfect, but they're bright and punchy, and it's decently priced.
SPECIFICATIONS
3D: No 4K: Yes. 3,840 x 2,160 TUNER: Yes. Freeview HD; DVB-S2 CONNECTIONS: 4 x HDMI inputs; 3 x USB; 1 x Scart; 1 x RF input; 1 x Ethernet; 1 x optical digital audio output; 1 x analogue audio input; 1 x component video input; 1 x headphone output; 1 x satellite input SOUND: 50W BRIGHTNESS (CLAIMED): 700 nits CONTRAST RATIO (CLAIMED): 500,000:1 DIMENSIONS (OFF STAND): 1,227(w) x 709(h) x 17(d)mm WEIGHT (OFF STAND): 19kg
FEATURES
USB multimedia playback; DLNA playback; Perfect Pixel UHD processing; Four-sided Ambilight; detachable wireless speakers; Android TV smart system; HDR ready; HDCP 2.2 on HDMI 1