Philips 48OLED759

Introduction

After almost disappearing a few years ago, Philips has rebuilt its TV brand on the back of OLED technology.

Combining OLED’s innate picture quality charms with Philips’ renowned processing know-how and unique Ambilight technology has helped the brand re-establish itself firmly at the heart of the European TV scene.

While Philips’ high-end OLED TVs have caught the eye and grabbed the headlines for their daring designs and uncompromising picture and sound, the brand has also done very well for itself at the more affordable end of the OLED market. A trend that deserves to continue with the 48OLED759.

Availability

Saying the 48OLED759 sits at the affordable end of the OLED market is an understatement. At the time of writing you can get one for £880 – the sort of price you might expect to pay for a solid mid-range LCD TV, and far less than you’d expect to pay for a TV that combines the charms of OLED technology with plenty of that quintessential Philips’ DNA and Ambilight.

Impressively cheap though the 48OLED759 is for an OLED TV, it’s worth noting that if you have room for a bigger screen its 55-inch sibling only costs £120 more.

The 48OLED759 is available in many European countries for €800, but isn’t sold in the US or Australia.

Design

• Three-sided Ambilight
• Chrome feet
• Ultra-thin screen frame

There’s nothing about the 48OLED759’s design or build quality that feels cheap. Particularly eye-catching for its money is its three-sided Ambilight system, where LEDs down the rear of the TV’s top, left and right edges cast out coloured light halos around the screen that can track the colour content of the images you’re watching. Or it can be set to output general ambient/bias lighting if that’s what you prefer.

You can also adjust both the speed with which the colours change and their general intensity and brightness. I’d suggest you set the brightness to a moderate level and the reaction speed fairly slow to make Ambilight more immersive, as its most aggressive settings can distract.

While its most unique feature, Ambilight isn’t the only attractive thing about the 48OLED759. The frame around the screen is impressively narrow, and the screen is also remarkably thin round the back at its outer edges. The chrome-finished blade-style feet Philips supplies with the TV look attractive and premium, too, if seen from an angle, but are so slim you can barely see them viewed head on.

If there’s a bum note in the 48OLED759’s design it’s that the rear panel juts out much more in its mid-section than it does at its outer edges. Most people don’t spend their time looking at the back of their TVs, though. So the worst that can be said about the slightly chunky rear is that it will make the TV stick out further from your wall than some other screens these days.

Features

• Titan OS smarts
• Comprehensive HDR support, including HDR10+ and Dolby Vision
• OLED screen

I’ve already covered the 48OLED759’s Ambilight technology, but it boasts more surprisingly premium features besides. For starters, the screen supports 120Hz refresh rates, and all four of its HDMI ports take in 4K/120Hz gaming feeds. It also supports variable refresh rates up to 120Hz, in the basic HDMI standard, Nvidia G-Sync and AMD FreeSync formats.

Gamers also benefit from auto low latency mode switching, resulting in an impressively swift 13.1ms of input lag, and this low input lag is available for Dolby Vision HDR games as well as HDR10 and SDR. In fact, the 48OLED759 actually supports all four of the current main HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, Dolby Vision and HDR10+, so it can play the best version of any content you feed it. Many rival brands, including Sony, Samsung and LG, only support either HDR10+ or Dolby Vision on their TVs, not both.

The 48OLED759 doesn’t feature the Micro Lens Array or the new RGB Tandem OLED technologies premium OLED TVs are using to enhance their brightness. Nor does it feature the enhanced colour phosphors of the so-called OLED Ex panels sported by Philips’ step up OLED809 range. But this is all only to be expected with such an affordable OLED TV. The fact that you’re getting OLED’s self-emissive pixels at all for under £900 is attraction enough.

What’s more, the 48OLED759’s panel is still driven by a version of Philips’ P5 processing engine. Not the latest, most powerful version, but still one with enough horsepower to work on what Philips considers to be the five most important pillars of picture quality: contrast, colour, sharpness, source detection and motion.

User Experience

• Titan OS interface
• No Apple TV+ app

The 48OLED759’s smart features are delivered by the new Titan OS. This is currently pitched as Philips’ step-down smart system, below the Google TV system used on its flagship TVs – but in some ways I prefer it to Google TV. Its graphics-rich presentation runs slickly and is more straightforward and easy to follow, and it covers all of the UK’s main terrestrial broadcaster catch up services.

If you’re a fan of talking to your TV, the 48OLED759’s smart system includes built-in Amazon Alexa voice recognition, and the ability to work with Google Assistant if you have an external Google Home device.

Titan OS didn’t seem particularly intelligent with its recommendations system, and it crashed a couple of times during my time with the TV. There was no sign of Apple TV+ on the current list of Titan OS apps, either. But overall it’s a good system for such an affordable TV.

Connectivity

• Four HDMI 2.1 inputs
• Bluetooth and Wi-Fi streaming

The 48OLED759’s connectivity is excellent. The fact that all four of its HDMIs support the full suite of 4K HDMI 2.1 features humbles many more expensive rivals, for starters.

There’s also eARC for sending sound – including lossless Dolby Atmos – via HDMI to compatible soundbars and AVRs, as well as a pair of USBs for playing back files from USB storage devices. Plus, of course, you can stream content to the TV via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

Picture Quality

• Excellent contrast
• Potent colour performance
• Adept gaming display

The 48OLED759 delivers ridiculously good pictures for such an affordable TV – propelled, of course, by its use of OLED technology.

As you would expect, OLED’s self-emissive pixels enable Philips’ TV to deliver outstanding contrast, as pitch black pixels sit right alongside bright white ones without a hint of compromise between the two. Something no LCD screen can do.

This is especially effective when showing fields of stars, but actually feeds into literally every pixel of every type of shot, not just dark scenes containing small bright highlights. No subtle shade of light or, even more importantly, colour looks ‘off’ or out of context, building a picture of rare, borderline peerless nuance and finesse for this level of the TV market.

Since the 48OLED759 doesn’t use a particularly cutting edge OLED panel, there’s a limit to the colour volume and brightness it can deliver. It peaks at a measured 810 nits of brightness rather than the 2000 nits and more the latest OLED TVs can muster, which drops to around 700 nits on the 10% HDR window most commonly regarded as the best representation of a TV’s true brightness capabilities. But you shouldn’t underestimate how effective that sort of peak brightness can be when it shares a screen with almost complete blackness.

The 48OLED759 also covers an impressive 98.7% of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum used in most HDR mastering – an impressive figure for such an affordable OLED model. The result is a rich, vibrant feel to HDR playback that’s rare at the sub-£1,000 price level. It’s not just the vibrancy that impresses; the light control and tonal management under the watchful eye of the P5 processor are good enough to ensure colours from the most heavily saturated to the most pale and complex skin tones are all rendered with much more mid-range aplomb than you’d normally get with such an affordable TV.

The subtlety of the 48OLED759’s colour and contrast is fully exploited by the P5 processor, when it comes to delivering a sharp, detailed picture that fully delivers on its 4K resolution despite the screen’s relative smallness. The sharpness holds up well even when there’s motion in the image, thanks to Philips’ strong suite of motion processing options, some of which take the edge off judder without making films look like cheap soap operas.

The 48OLED759 also stands out from the sub-£1k TV crowd by providing a good range of picture presets, with its default Crystal Clear mode prioritising punch and sharpness if that’s what you like, while the Filmmaker Mode is on hand to provide a more accurate (if slightly dull, once you’ve got used to Crystal Clear) image.

With the 48OLED759 also benefiting from OLED’s traditional strength versus LCD TVs when it comes to effective viewing angles and delivering a superbly responsive, crisp, fluid and rich gaming experience – all backed up by Ambilight – really the only issues I could raise with its pictures are that they’re clearly less bright with HDR, especially full-screen HDR, than some LCD and OLED TVs costing around or just above the £1,000 mark, and that you may find you need to experiment quite with some of its long list of picture settings to get the best out of it.

Though having said that, the 48OLED759’s relatively entry level status in Philips’ range makes it actually easier to use than the brand’s more premium models.

Sound Quality

• Good detailing with Dolby Atmos
• 2 x 10W speaker set up
• Occasional bass crackle

The 48OLED759’s audio doesn’t punch above its high-value weight quite as much as its pictures, but it still sounds better than most similarly priced rivals.

Starting with the bad news, its fairly straightforward 2 x 10W speaker configuration doesn’t quite get loud enough to give films truly cinematic levels of audio heft and presence. Some of Hollywood’s biggest bass rumbles and drops also cause the speakers to start sounding congested, wooly, and even a bit crackly when the going gets tough.

Movie moments that cause this sort of low frequency discomfort are few and far between. What’s more, for the most part, the Philips 48OLED759 actually deserves credit for delivering a deeper, more consistently present sense of bass than most TVs in its class.

It does this while retaining enough power to also project a surprisingly large sound stage for such a compact TV. Especially noticeable with Dolby Atmos mixes, off-screen sound effects and scoring appear comfortably beyond the TV’s physical extremities without sounding dislocated from the main action, brittle or vague.

Vocal tracks always sound clear without becoming over-bright, too, and while max volume levels might not blow your socks off, impact sounds have a decent amount of bite, and there’s enough headroom in the speakers’ design to allow the TV to keep up with escalating action or horror scenes as their soundtracks expand towards their crescendo.

Should you buy it?