Philips 803 (65OLED803) Review & Comments

Phil Hinton

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So... As a screen it's great... As a telly it's a bit pap... Not a terrible situation for those who use external sources exclusively!
 
What do you do when the rear ambilight led fail ?
Cart the whole set off for them to be replaced and hope your 65inch dont come back damaged .
 
Great review!

Shame about the input lag, how much will it affect a casual console gamer?

Br J
 
great review phil,sounds like great picture quality but why pay £200 more than the 65 c8 at current prices.
 
@Phil Hinton Mr Hinton, I know that I need new glasses, but I can't seem to see a price for this Philips OLED anywhere in the review?
 
great review phil,sounds like great picture quality but why pay £200 more than the 65 c8 at current prices.
Up to the end user of course as to where they place value. But it should be a consideration to those looking at a 2018 OLED.
 
@Phil Hinton Mr Hinton, I know that I need new glasses, but I can't seem to see a price for this Philips OLED anywhere in the review?


Believe they are going for £2999 which considering no Freeview Play, ITV Hub, All4 and My5, poor input lag means not the screen for me. And as reported above its £200 more than the LG 65C8 and Pana 65FZ802
 
Great review!

Shame about the input lag, how much will it affect a casual console gamer?

Br J
Best way to check would be to find a friendly dealer who can demo and let you test it out. I think Richer Sounds should have these and they are very accommodating in my experience to demos.
I didn't have any issues, but I'm a terrible gamer.
 
Thank you for the review.
Do you think input lag is really that crucial for single player games with a controller? The frame time shoud be around 33 for 30fps games, surely 38ms cant be that terribly noticable?
Also have you tried playing games with Perfect Natural Motion enabled?
 
So Oreo will be a great game-changer or a huge disappointment. Keep in mind that the right software runs great on underpowered CPUs. Let’s wait and see.
 
Thank you for the review.
Do you think input lag is really that crucial for single player games with a controller? The frame time shoud be around 33 for 30fps games, surely 38ms cant be that terribly noticable?
Also have you tried playing games with Perfect Natural Motion enabled?

Maybe I am wrong but the lag means that it needs 38ms between your controller command and actual movement on the screen. It has nothing to do with frequency so a calculation like 1/38ms is useless. Humans use controllers based on the visual input - the picture on TV. So actions are delayed.
 
So Oreo will be a great game-changer or a huge disappointment. Keep in mind that the right software runs great on underpowered CPUs. Let’s wait and see.
Well, I have Oreo on the AF9 I am reviewing at the moment and it is far superior to the AF8 and 803, but it also has a better chipset so hard to tell if it would be as big an improvement on the Philips. They are sending me a 903 for review and I'll be doing some longer-term testing with that sample, so hoping to fully test Oreo as soon as it is available as the 803 and 903 are identical apart from the soundbar.
 
Thank you for the review.
Do you think input lag is really that crucial for single player games with a controller? The frame time shoud be around 33 for 30fps games, surely 38ms cant be that terribly noticable?
Also have you tried playing games with Perfect Natural Motion enabled?
I would normally say that under 40ms is desirable on any TV. I, however, don't want to say it'll be fine for you as you really need to test it personally. I didn't try it with any processing switched on, the idea is to have the least amount going on for the best input lag. HTHs
 
two HDMI slots which are full bandwidth HDMI 2.0b ports capable of supporting 4:4:4 4K/60p signals. If you want to get the most from your 4K sources, such as an Xbox One X, these are the only two HDMIs that can support this.

The downwards facing connections include a further two HDMI slots which are not full bandwidth but will support 4K/30p signals, along with satellite and terrestrial tuners,
Only 2 full HDMI ports...:thumbsdow:thumbsdow:thumbsdow
 
i'd pay the £200 for the ambilight feature alone, spent about that manually adding it onto a sharp 80" - couldn't live without it!

great review phil,sounds like great picture quality but why pay £200 more than the 65 c8 at current prices.
 
I would normally say that under 40ms is desirable on any TV. I, however, don't want to say it'll be fine for you as you really need to test it personally. I didn't try it with any processing switched on, the idea is to have the least amount going on for the best input lag. HTHs

I see. Thank you.
The thing is in many tests of the P5 processing i have seen that people can play with Natural Motion with lag of 55ms (when other TV's can go way over 100), but it does great job at smoothing those 30 fps so i thought it might be worthy to test and point out :p

Maybe I am wrong but the lag means that it needs 38ms between your controller command and actual movement on the screen. It has nothing to do with frequency so a calculation like 1/38ms is useless. Humans use controllers based on the visual input - the picture on TV. So actions are delayed.

Those number do correlate a bit. How many frames or fractions of a frames passes before you see the input actually happens.
With 60 or more FPS i would say 38 ms is very huge, i am not so sure about 30.
 
It's confirmed as a 2018 OLED panel.
Thanks for that.

I wonder what panel was in the Philips 803 reviewed in France then?
With the small blue sub-pixel shown in the photo it clearly isn't a standard 2018, or a 2017 panel.
Perhaps this is simply a mid-year revision to the 2018 panel.

I cannot see any reason why LG would ever want to reduce the size of a sub-pixel. Even if they did get a much more efficient blue emitter, wouldn't it be better to drive the same size sub-pixel less hard than have a smaller sub-pixel and drive it harder? (Especially as blue lifespan was the issue that resulted in LG increasing the size of that sub-pixel in the 2017 panel.)
 
@Phil Hinton thank you for a really superb review and I mean every word.

You confirmed what I was suspecting, there is a raw diamond there. Beside some annoying shortfalls (2 hdmi full fat and input lag,..), biggest one for me is OS and hdr for key apps...
So an improved overall experience and features via Oreo is a must (with current soc)

I will also say that we are watching Philips TP vision move this year and next. Thats their last chance to get it right or be completely forgotten. If they pull it out, they will be a force to reckon with.

LG needed several iteration and Sony just about finally got it with af9 (dv still need to be sorted). Philips can have the same latitude...time will tell.
 
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I find it odd that Phillips will update the Android OS to version 8 when version 9 was released in August 2018.............on a TV with a suggested retail price of £2999.00 seems a little mean to me :-(
 
Thanks for that.

I wonder what panel was in the Philips 803 reviewed in France then?
With the small blue sub-pixel shown in the photo it clearly isn't a standard 2018, or a 2017 panel.
Perhaps this is simply a mid-year revision to the 2018 panel.

I cannot see any reason why LG would ever want to reduce the size of a sub-pixel. Even if they did get a much more efficient blue emitter, wouldn't it be better to drive the same size sub-pixel less hard than have a smaller sub-pixel and drive it harder? (Especially as blue lifespan was the issue that resulted in LG increasing the size of that sub-pixel in the 2017 panel.)
The blue is smaller but the red is bigger. The French review is not the only one that showed the pixel structure so it definitely is in all the 803/903 sets ...
I have never seen a pixel structure posted in an AVF review so they probably just checked with Philips rather than inspecting it.

I find it odd that Phillips will update the Android OS to version 8 when version 9 was released in August 2018.............on a TV with a suggested retail price of £2999.00 seems a little mean to me :-(

I guess there is Android TV Pie already but I've read it still takes a lot of customization (and testing) to implement each brands own features
 
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