Philips OLED TV shootout at Abbey Road Studios - The Results! - news discussion

For COD i dont know but Halo looks fantastic on XsX in 120fps mode,i played alot of console games on Ps5 and XsX witch support 120fps mode and on some like Dirt 5 drop in resolution is noticable but in others like Halo looks really great.
For situation with Mediatek i dont think there is solution,only new generation of this chip can fix situation on TV brands witch use it.
I agree, I played doom eternal at 120fps for the very reason that it just felt miles smoother than at 60, the drop off in fidelity wasn't large enough for me not to be bothered about it, especially in such a fast moving game.
 
A bit of fun on a Sunday morning amongst friends perhaps it might have been. An independent review unfortunately it is most certainly not.

In some ways it comes as no surprise as the most expensive TV won. It's a retailer after all.
A bit derogatory calling professionals having a bit of fun on a Sunday morning.

Doesn't the retailer sell all those tvs? If you can prove that they are getting more commission for Sony and Pansonic tv's, then I'm all ears.
 
I agree, I played doom eternal at 120fps for the very reason that it just felt miles smoother than at 60, the drop off in fidelity wasn't large enough for me not to be bothered about it, especially in such a fast moving game.
DOOM Eternal is the second game where i feel this kind of lost smoothnes like in Halo Infinite.

Also i find VRR huge plus for TV,i use it on PC and XsX gaming and hope soon Ps5.
 
As an outsider with very limited knowledge, I would side with the unsponsored HDTVTest shootout over the sponsored Philips one. Not disregarding the credibility of Philips shootout and not saying VT is the best out there but going by the in-depth analysis and reasons given, the HDTVTest shootout looks and sounds more sensible to me. YMMV. :)

I really hope this thread doesn't get locked.
 
I'm afraid the whole thing immediately falls down for credibility. It' not independently done.



As for the taping up (very badly done) there's enough of a reveal of bezel in the corner of at least one TV.

In the case of sudden amnesia taking place over night you would only have to look down at the stands which were Vesa wheel based.

Calibration stage.....

View attachment 1604824

Judging stage.....

View attachment 1604825

A bit of fun on a Sunday morning amongst friends perhaps it might have been. An independent review unfortunately it is most certainly not.



Now regards the Philips event.....

Session 1 was the Calibrated & Filmmaker mode and that is of the most pertinent interest to most as a truer independent test I would say.

Independent Calibrators (who did not judge) and AVForum members who judged.

So the results of the Calibrated and Filmmaker Mode section in SDR and HDR were as follows
  • Set D - 4% of the vote
  • Set C - 18% of the vote
  • Set A - 24% of the vote
  • Set B - 26% of the vote
  • No Preference - 28% of the vote
So the winner was No Preference, 2nd LG, 3rd Panasonic, 4th Philips, 5th Sony.

Given that all the TV's were calibrated and presented equally that largely comes across in the results. It would be very hard to tell the difference and it was. It's what you would expect anyway.

The manufacturer who sponsored the event, well their set came in 4th in that session.

None of the 4 sets were bad, 3 were very close to each other.



It's a TV shootout so the lexicon needs to adjusted. If we are talking about the strict standards that would involve a drug approval process with randomized trials or double upgraded observational studies then we there has never been even a remotely valid TV shootout in history.

Unless a really wealthy oligarch wants to fund this for giggles we are going to have to rely on a very niche group to conduct these events with obvious limitations and so far the only ones who are sponsoring it to date that I am aware of has been either electronics stores or a TV brand themselves.

If you think there is more validity in a sponsor who is directly in the event and controls both the content and questions that directly lead to any scoring without any input from another party and with no reference monitor then I don't know what to tell you.

Analyzing photos like it's moon landing footage to invalidate all of the effort that went into that is silly. The previous Phillips shootout they accidently displayed the info bar for Panasonic FZ802 to the entire room and no one made a big deal of it because it's not a big deal.

It's a TV shootout and there will be some minor things here and there as we are not trying to get same efficacy as you would see for more serious trials so I wouldn't get carried away with things like that. The main things you should care about are how the scoring being done. If you are being asked to judge color then are you doing this against a reference monitor or is it an opinion of what you like best? (Beatles vs Stones)

Anyway we are getting into a silly debate here. The HDTVTest results line up very closely with AVForums own reviews of the OLEDs so none of the category winners are completely out of line(Panasonic winning Home Cinema, LG winning gaming, Sony winning motion with Phillips in second over Panasonic and LG...etc.).


In some ways it comes as no surprise as the most expensive TV won. It's a retailer after all.

In some ways it comes as no surprise that the most expensive TVs with a heatsink would have an some advantage.
 
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So last time time Vincent did a shootout with the general public, it was crititicised for that very reason. It couldn't be considered serious and was just a bit of fun and this time he's done it with professional calibrators and he's been criticised again. Think the issue might be Vincent for some people.
I’ve no dog in this fight and acknowledge that both shootouts weren’t perfect. They can’t possibly be. But Teogh’s attitude reeks of smug arrogance, suggesting as it does that the AVF test was rigged and that the people involved in it didn’t know what they were doing. Not a good look, particularly for a retailer like C&M. I wouldn’t buy a spare plug from him if that’s his attitude.
 
... so, the second shootout was organised (and paid for ...) by Philips, and the content shown chosen by ... Philips, and the image mode (Vivid on that occasion ...!!!) chosen by ... Philips, and ladies & gents the winner is ...

Of course, every serious viewer watches his films/series, whatever, in ... Vivid mode ...!!! 😁
 
Yep I include myself in that. I have owned a few LCDs of various quality, a panasonic plasma and my current oled, plus a few projectors. I came out of the event thinking ok I wasn't the right audience, I am just not good enough at spotting small difference, and never owned a calibrated display (want to get my projector calibrated but that's another topic, was going to ask Steve his rates but he was busy chatting so thought leave alone).

However after sleeping on it I realised that is kinda the point, no one will own all 4 or line them up, and so it's a question of are they a good image or not, would I want one in my lounge. Outside the real hardcore image pros of the forums, I am probably in a similar position to most. So it comes down to personal preference of to my eyes, and the other 28 participants, which is a more natural image.

Honest opinion was I preferred the Philips but it was an insanely close thing.
I’d much rather have the honest opinions of 30 enthusiasts than those of 3 self styled experts in a test that was not “independent”. Enthusiasts judge as consumers and customers, which is good enough for me as a consumer and potential customer myself.
 
I did notice no Dolby vision was tested
There was a reason for this that was explained on the night. I forget all the technical terms but I believe it was to do with the fact that there's some sort of handshake between source and TV. As the source feed was going through a 4-way distribution box, it would impossible for this to work correctly with 4 different TV's at once.
 
... so, the second shootout was organised (and paid for ...) by Philips, and the content shown chosen by ... Philips, and the image mode (Vivid on that occasion ...!!!) chosen by ... Philips, and ladies & gents the winner is ...

Of course, every serious viewer watches his films/series, whatever, in ... Vivid mode ...!!! 😁

You can pick apart any shootout, every one will have weakness, however well intended. All i know is even after they picked scenes that flavored their processing, the shootout was close, so they weren't all out cheating or they could have made the differences bigger. There was 2 respected AVforums guys doing the calibration to make things as fair as possible. Personally i saw nothing that concerned me about how it was setup and i was looking for it, as i was curious. The vivid mode was only half of the content looked at, the other half was in filmmaker / calilbrated mode, so best that any of us would use at home and still the philips edged it.

Its why i never buy on a single review, every reviewer has their own bias, and so you have to take in as much info from as many sources and make a judgement.
 
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I’ve no dog in this fight and acknowledge that both shootouts weren’t perfect. They can’t possibly be. But Teogh’s attitude reeks of smug arrogance, suggesting as it does that the AVF test was rigged and that the people involved in it didn’t know what they were doing. Not a good look, particularly for a retailer like C&M. I wouldn’t buy a spare plug from him if that’s his attitude.
I don't really understand the criticism of the Philips shootout. It was not intended to be a completely unbiased test of TVs and nobody ever pretended either before hand or at the event that it was.

It was a manufacturer sponsored even where the manufacturer chose the test clips and the modes for the second half of the test. Of course Philips was going to win the test overall as they were simply demonstrating that their Vivid mode is better than that other manufacturers. (Not a particularly high bar given how poor Vivid is generally.)

The only pseudo unbiased element was the first part where the TV were in calibrated/Film maker mode - and that came out as no clear preference as all the TVs were simply so close. (Even though we were watching content chosen by Philips.)

Vincent's test attempted to be unbiased but as he said he guessed which TV was which. In practice there was no way to avoid this as he is so familiar with the sets performance.

Nobody without any skin in the game is ever going to pay the many thousands of pounds it would cost to have a truly blind test with a £30k reference monitor to compare.
 
... so, the second shootout was organised (and paid for ...) by Philips, and the content shown chosen by ... Philips, and the image mode (Vivid on that occasion ...!!!) chosen by ... Philips, and ladies & gents the winner is ...

Of course, every serious viewer watches his films/series, whatever, in ... Vivid mode ...!!! 😁

It also won the filmmaker mode which is the relevant one tbh. You can basically discount the other part. The Sony fairing so poorly is the big news I suppose when you put it against HDTV's shootout.

Philips if they have another one of these need to put their vivid mode against filmmaker/custom mode and see if anybody prefers that or else it's simply a point-scoring exercise.
 
If you look up last years Phillips shootout and the year before it’s the same old discussion…
It’s a bit of fun and a chance for like minded enthusiasts/pro’s (keep in mind some of us enthusiasts have THX video certifications, it’s just we don’t / didn’t take calibration up professionally so we can’t assume those at the event don’t know what they are looking for).
At the end of the day, it’s your choice, read reviews, demo and really take a look at the owners threads, then make your choice.

Every year is the same, tv just slightly differ and have their strengths and weaknesses.
You can’t go that wrong, competition is great, keeps them on their toes…ish

Next year we will have QDOled in the mix and off we go again…
 
... you mean next year, in spite of not having QDoled panels (only Samy and maybe Sony will get them from Samy Display ...), Philips will still win the shootout ...? :laugh:
 
Yeah, but there will be ambiquantumlight!
 
Thanks to Philips and AV Forums for setting up this great event.

In the first calibrated/filmmaker round there really wasn't much to choose between the sets and the overall winner was "No Preference". This is pretty much what you would expect given that all four TVs use the same underlying panel and the individual manufacturers processing was largely switched off. Despite the sets being calibrated there were some small noticeable differences in colour that were most noticeable to me in skin tones.

The biggest difference was in the just above black presentation. There was a scene from the Revenant with a very dark background and a relatively bright face in the foreground. The Panasonic showed by far the most background detail. Usually I would say that this is what I would prefer but it was interesting to see this approach next to sets that were crushing the blacks somewhat. It showed that having the extra detail in the dark background by having brighter just above black light levels comes at the cost of reduced overall contrast i.e. on the Panasonic the background was dark grey whereas the other sets lost this detail but had black backgrounds which accentuated the brightness of the face more. I wondered if the reason for this difference was that the Panasonic can be calibrated in finer detail at the lower end of the brightness scale. Most TVs have a minimum configurable greyscale point of 10% so you cannot calibrate any brightness level below this. The Panasonic has controls for some points between 1% and 10%.

The second round was Philips Vivid mode vs everyone else's Vivid mode.
Philips was the clear winner. To me this shows that Philips have put significant effort into their Vivid mode whereas everyone else (especially Sony) seem to just turn all their the processing up to 11 which led to some artificial looking images.

The most notable difference was on one clip with very fast panning of detailed scenes. (Far faster than you would ever get in real content, even sports such as F1 or football .) In this clip the picture on the Sony and the LG broke up as their inter-frame MCFI processing simply could not keep up, whereas the Panasonic and Philips images remained stable. This looked awful for the Sony and LG. However, you should not use this to judge the LG and Sony motion processing badly. It may simply be that their processing is more aggressive in vivid mode. We did not get a chance to see if tweaking the Sony or LG motion settings would have resulted in motion just like the Panasonic and Philips.

Overall, for someone who generally wont use vivid mode, the message was that all 4 OLED sets are incredibly close. However, Philips do provide some useful picture processing options that will be helpful, especially for motion.

Where the Philips will really stand out from the crowd will be in terms of features and in this area Philips really do have some USPs.
(1) Ambilight - some may view this as a gimic but at very least it is a really useful D65 bias light. If you use it to follow the colours on the TV screen it really does seem to extend the viewing experience. Philips should definitely aim to get their TVs on wall displays showing off this unique feature.
(2) Sound - many of us on these forums may have good surround systems but many people simply do not want this sort of complexity. By working with Bowers and Wilkins Philips have produced some great sound solutions. The Bowers and Wilkins speakers on the 986 really do sound great. Unfortunately we did not get to hear the 936 but i would not be surprised if this comfortably beta the other three sets. (It would be great if they could integrate these B&W TV speakers with the B&W multiroom speakers for multiroom.)
(3) Price - current street prices are as follows - Sony A90J £3,499, Panasonic £2,799, Philips 936 £2,299, LG G1 £2,199. The Philips was the second cheapest set here. The Sony looks really overpriced out of these sets. The Philips is more than the LG but has the B&W sound bar and Ambilight plus appears to have better processing.
Personally I have my eye on the 48" Philips 936 (already had it on the 935 and may still go for that now that they are at rockbottom price [and doesn't make the soundbar look so cheap]), but the 936 in euroland is not nearly as cheap as the UK 'street' price, in fact it's advertised street price is practically the same as the Sony in 65" and the same goes for the Panasonic (but you can easily get big discounts with some 'negotiating'). The LG though is miles cheaper, close to 33% cheaper even before 'negotiating' ... Looking at German prices the Philips is ~£2870 and the Sony already ~£2440 (1 early Black Friday deal has the Philips closer to the £2400 level. But the absolute cheapest listed price for the Sony in turn is £2180).

Some comments make it seem only this one clip was used to score the motion or was it the decider/tiebreaker? And as has also been mentioned in the early comments shame that no sports clips have been used that everyone is familiar with, like football and tennis to judge motion (interpolation). The one thing Philips had over the other OLEDs on day 1 was their Perfect Clear Motion and now adds some functional BFI with the Fast Motion Clarity setting. Sony interpolation in Vivid mode is surely to be maxed out and would cause major soap opera effect in normal content (apart from sports) and is something you more than likely would never use. What I haven't come across yet (or have forgotten by now) is what Motion settings the Philips is set to in Vivid mode (vaguely recall asking for it in the previous shootutout and may have gotten the answer back then).

And finally, listening to the AVF reviews of the A90J and the 806 Philips you would think this shootout would end differently :clown:
 
Do you know that 936 on 48 size have same panel as on 935? Only 55 and 65 have new EVO panels.
 
There was a reason for this that was explained on the night. I forget all the technical terms but I believe it was to do with the fact that there's some sort of handshake between source and TV. As the source feed was going through a 4-way distribution box, it would impossible for this to work correctly with 4 different TV's at once.
I raised this question at the beginning, all HDR was HDR10 due to a limitation on the distribution box. It was explained that if they had used DV then it had the potential for the image to be presented incorrectly, I think its the way DV does some sort of syncing with profiles.
 
Missed all this but hats off to Phil and Steve. Just done in time for those BF and CM deals to inform product choices and snag a bargain.
 
Do you know that 936 on 48 size have same panel as on 935? Only 55 and 65 have new EVO panels.
Yes no new panels for 48" but still has some small upgrades with hdmi 2.1/ new Android TV platform, improved BFI(?) and some further tweaking to the soundbar. Of course if you were to buy it right now the price difference is not worth these differences.
For a 48" all-in-one solution (no separate speakers) I think the choices are this or the Sony A9S and the Sony is still too expensive for what it is (basically an A8 with worse sound).

I suspect they don't like the real world approach as it devolves power away from lab toys and places the power of judgement where it matters.
Having seen their shootout(s): it isn't based on measurements either o_O. But like the AVF test, they don't give actual ratings, only first to last place and you may end up having the bottom tv maybe scoring a 9 out of 10 in normal scoring vs >9.5 for the others and here maybe getting the majority of last places by a whisker and scoring a 2.1 vs >4 (out of 5) for the others

And as you may have seen his channel is filled with Philips sponsored items, frankly it's the only brand that sends him review samples 😅
 
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I do like Vincents channel and his honest appraisals.
This test was interesting as its based on human perception. We live in the real world. Lab tests with all their charts and graphs live in a false world that measures things that are well beyond human perceptive powers. Which makes them invisible and inaudible. Same goes for gaming lag. Humans can't discern the difference between 0.09 and 0.30.. It's physically impossible.
I suspect they don't like the real world approach as it devolves power away from lab toys and places the power of judgement where it matters.
When there have been such tests with things like hi res and Cd sources that found that listeners couldn't hear the difference, people on places like the Hoffman forums were committing harikari. The truth was too much to take.
Samsung did well for its brute force. Its got so much brightness that it couldn't loose in certain tests.
The validity of the second test raised concerns for me where they clumped together calibrated and out of the box scores to work out an average. This clearly skewed the final result.
Afterwards I watched vinnies Panasonic review where he had some significant concerns about the TV but still gave it a highly recommended rating.
Let's see what he makes of the 936 when he gets one.
Ive for my eye on the Philips to buy when it's available but the recent avf review and this test have raised some red flags for me.

Blind testing (real world testing) will always get the technophobes up in arms.
Trusting human judgements and their limits of perception just doesn't figure in their limited world.
An interesting test that could have easily been better.
 
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I raised this question at the beginning, all HDR was HDR10 due to a limitation on the distribution box. It was explained that if they had used DV then it had the potential for the image to be presented incorrectly, I think its the way DV does some sort of syncing with profiles.
It was a good question, I wondered if they could use four Amazon 4K Fire Sticks in the future and rig the button presses with a Logitech Harmony or something similar. It would have been good to see DV.
 
Why does it feel like every forum member present there was asked to write a nice sponsored message in the discussions? Did they all get a free oled?
 
so basically in film maker mode for sdr and hdr, after no preference, the LG G1 has the most votes.
More important is that A90J is last...taking high price in consideration....
 

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