Philips 903 (55OLED903) Review & Comments

Does the 903 have a clear dialouge/voice sound option? Could not figure it out via google.
 
I just bought a 1TB SSD to use it for watching media AND to record TV programme.
As long as I see 903 formats my ssd to FAT32 for recording which is a joke as I would like to watch file bigger than 4GB.
Is there a way to achieve both recording capability and large file support (like on NTFS for example)?
 
new firmware aviable :clap:
Got it on my 803 and this issue is not fixed (version is TPM171E_R.107.001.101.002).

EDIT2 : my friend confirmed that deleting the Molotov app made his TV fast again, no more issues for him, I'll check mine when I get back home.

EDIT : Someone on reddit found that Molotov is the issue, slowing down the whole TV, I'll try disabling it tonight.
 
Last edited:
new firmware aviable :clap:

The update seems at first to fix the audio drop problem BUT yesterday I watch 3 hours Netflix and occurred again only once but it was there again... The slow tv problem and Molotov app remove solution probably is a different issue. I never experience any slowness only random audio drops watching Netflix and Amazon Video.

Has anyone experience the audio drop issue after the update as i have??
 
The update seems at first to fix the audio drop problem BUT yesterday I watch 3 hours Netflix and occurred again only once but it was there again... The slow tv problem and Molotov app remove solution probably is a different issue. I never experience any slowness only random audio drops watching Netflix and Amazon Video.

Has anyone experience the audio drop issue after the update as i have??
The slowness can be subtle, but removing Molotov also fixed 5.1 audio "slowing down", cracking and sometimes dropping, in all apps playing 5.1 content and even 5.1 external sources.

Does it happen regularly like every 10 seconds ? If so, it's caused by Molotov.

Note that stereo content is not or less affected, but sometimes in the YouTube app I had pauses caused by this issue. Not anymore.
 
The slowness can be subtle, but removing Molotov also fixed 5.1 audio "slowing down", cracking and sometimes dropping, in all apps playing 5.1 content and even 5.1 external sources.

Does it happen regularly like every 10 seconds ? If so, it's caused by Molotov.

Note that stereo content is not or less affected, but sometimes in the YouTube app I had pauses caused by this issue. Not anymore.

No. It occurs randomly with no pattern.. But before the update was way more frequently.
 
Just got Phillips 903 and I'm setting up.
Think I've got Alexa working but I'm missing iPlayer. It's not appearing in the play store and I don't see any other way to get it

I don't seem to see anything official looking in the store tbh, itv, all4 etc all missing
What am I doing wrong??
 
Hi, I've bought a 55" 903 in November and this is how 5% gray looks like:

I haven't really seen this kind of uniformity issue in the samples that I have checked so far.

I'm past the return period, contacted Philips customer care, they took the TV to a service where they said they don't see any issues using the official test images so it is not eligible for a panel replacement - there didn't seem to be a dark gray image in the test set. That corner kind of glows for dark content and it's even visible in the menus in a dark environment.

Will try reaching out to the retailer as well, but I wonder if anyone has any tips or experience in dealing with such issues in the EU.
 
Last edited:

Attachments

  • A426F5A3-18DC-457F-9EDC-F1D9DF194BF4.png
    A426F5A3-18DC-457F-9EDC-F1D9DF194BF4.png
    393.1 KB · Views: 128
Was hoping there might be a Dolby vision update or at least hdr10+ which I’m still miffed at not getting
 
reset the colour control (hue/intensity) stuff to factory default mate - simply adjusting the colour temperature gives results that all sit below DE3. After getting the TV professionally calibrated earlier this year, and doing my own HDR calibration using a HDR test suite:

SDR
ISF Day/Night - will need to be adjusted/saved per source. Can lock the setting by highlighting the name of the picture mode from the settings menu and type "473473"

Colour - 50
Contrast - 44 (adjust depending on room brightness, it's essentially the backlight for this set)
Sharpness - 0
Brightness - 50
Colour enhancement - off
Colour gamut - normal
Colour temperature - custom
Red WP - 126
Green WP - 116
Blue WP - 92
(Black level/BL settings at default 0)
(all colour control settings at default 0)

Contrast mode - normal. Contrast mode on this set deals with ABL... You can set it to "optimised for picture" for reduced perception of ABL brightness drops when fullscreen white/bright images occur - but it introduces a level of dynamic contrast as well, which is usually a worse trade off. Some films (Arrival for example) have a high black level which makes blacks seem quite grey - "optimised for picture" is somewhat beneficial in this instance. It works differently for HDR but we'll cover that later.

Perfect natural reality - off. It's a pseudo HDR mode which attempts to expand the luminance curve beyond the normal SDR range. I don't particularly like it, but it can look good (on minimum) in some content.

Video contrast - 100. This is the traditional contrast setting (rather than "contrast" which is basically OLED light/backlight) There's no reason to change it from 100 with SDR content, none of the high end is crushed below reference white.

Light sensor - off. You can change this if you want to mess around with a "midrange" contrast (backlight) setting that ends up looking good when automatically changed by this setting for a dark/bright environment. I prefer keeping it off.

Gamma - +4. By all means you can keep this on 0, but setting it at "4" tracks gamma 2.4 nicely, which shows off the deeper black levels of the TV without crushing detail at the low end. SDR content normally doesn't have much going on at the low/high end anyway so I feel gamma 2.4 works nicely here. It will track 2.2 at "0" but the low end will end up looking more washed out in my honest opinion - not really what you want from a high end OLED

Ultra resolution - off
Noise reduction - off (I recommend "minimum" for HDR but we'll get to that later)
MPEG artifact reduction - off. Does nothing for banding pixel shimmering, or relatively high quality sources.
Motion style - Movie. There's really no reason not to use this setting. Some content that swaps between 24fps/30fps and 60fps (YouTube vids or BBC broadcasts for example) can confuse the setting for a couple of seconds and produce a minor stutter on scene change - but overall it's a perfect setting for nearly all content to reduce OLED stutter and increase motion resolution without causing a soap opera effect.
Picture format original. This is "just scan" on other sets and stops images being cut off/culled.

HDR

Picture style - HDR movie. You can choose any HDR mode for these settings, I just went with "movie" because it made more sense and will be saved across all sources without re-adjusting.

Colour - 50
Contrast (backlight) - 100
Sharpness - 0
Brightness - 70. By default the TV culls near-black detail - there's no way to "fix" this without setting the Brightness level to 100. Unfortunately at 100 brightness all black levels will be massively inflated and look somewhat grey (even if you change gamma to +4), especially in a dark room where you want inky blacks on your expensive OLED TV. Having brightness at "70" is a trade off between seeing more near-black detail and having true "black" still staying inky, even in the dark.
Colour enhancement - off
Colour temperature - Warm. Custom colour settings are saved across all sources, so you can't dial in a separate custom colours for HDR and SDR. This is OK, as "warm" ends up tracking colours pretty well on this set for HDR, and SDR's colour presets are more inaccurate. As a result, you won't be setting custom colour temps for HDR.
Contrast Mode - Optimised for picture. This is a trade-off. With "normal" selected the TV doesn't track the PQ EOTF/luminance curve accurately, and also doesn't hit the TV's maximum peak brightness of 900 nits on specular highlight detail. With "optimised for picture" you get better peak brightness and a more accurate luminance curve, but it also occasionally dims the "backlight" on dark scenes for some content - which can reduce the impact of (for example) a single candle in a dimly lit room. I believe "Optimised for picture" is the way to go though.
HDR perfect - off. You could set this to "minimum" if you wanted brighter highlight detail, but more often than not it will also slightly wash out or change the colour of some brighter elements. As an example, the sky in the NETFLIX series Black Summer... It should have an almost dirty/warm tinge to the blue of the sky, which ends up looking far brighter and more blue if "minimum" is selected. Up to you.
Video Contrast - 96. This allows the TV to tone map/show detail upto 4000nits. By default, at 100 anything above around 2500nits is culled.
Light sensor - off
Gamma - 0 (adjusting to +4, like in our SDR settings, just culls the near-black detail we gained by adjusting brightness to 70)
Ultra resolution - Off
Noise reduction - minimum. There's no getting around it, the colour banding by default on this set is pretty terrible for HDR content (especially on blue tones). Watch something like the Blade Runner 4K rerelease, or Dunkirk and you'll spend your time looking at flickering/banding in the sky or how macroblocking noise seems to be unreasonably bad. Setting noise reduction to minimum does reduce this considerably without losing too much in the way of resolution detail. It's not perfect, but it's as good as it gets on this set.
MPEG noise reduction - off. Doesn't seem to do anything for high def sources. The little description makes it sound like it would reduce banding/posterization but after loads of testing it simply doesn't. Maybe it has an impact on low res sources? Don't have any to test.
Motion style - Movie.
Pictureformat - original.

Philips are well aware of the posterization, banding, and macroblocking/noise issues present on the 803/903 (and 2017 versions) which is why they've reduced it somewhat with firmware updates, added a separate processor to the 2019 version (along with using it for Dolby Vision support) and showed off the improvements that they've made to their image processing. Don't expect any image improvements from now on in my honest opinion - it's just a small mark on an otherwise decent TV.
Excellent settings these, and I live by them for my Philips OLED 754. Same processor I believe. Just wondering what you would have down for HDR gaming? Use the HDR movie mode ones? Got a ps5 with some beautiful games and want the HDR to look it's best!
 
Excellent settings these, and I live by them for my Philips OLED 754. Same processor I believe. Just wondering what you would have down for HDR gaming? Use the HDR movie mode ones? Got a ps5 with some beautiful games and want the HDR to look it's best!

Wouldn't hold your breath - my HDR is bugged on this tv and Philips have been 'looking into it' for nearly 12 months
 

The latest video from AVForums

Is 4K Blu-ray Worth It?
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Back
Top Bottom