Televisions

Philips has long had a reputation in the TV world for going further than most when it comes to video processing. This trend continues with its new 55PFL8008.

Philips has thrown everything bar the kitchen sink at its 6 Series high street hotshot. This 4K UHD LED model doesn't just try to woo with a low price tag, it wows with a host of fan-favourite features, including Ambilight, multi-HDR and Amazon Alexa voice support.

Just as Spinal Tap’s amps go to 11, then Philips’ 58PFL9955H goes to 21. Or 21:9, to be precise. This is the much-anticipated sequel to the brand’s original, ground-breaking and seriously movie-friendly Cinema 21:9 – a TV which laughed in the piffling face of your usual 16:9-ratio TVs and stretched to embrace the extra girth of the ultra-wide CinemaScope aspect ratio still used on the majority of cinematically released films.

Philips is aiming for the front of the grid with the 65OLED+936. An evolution of the brand's OLED+935 model, this update couples a racy fifth-generation P5 image engine with an all-new OLED panel and HDMI 2.1 high frame rate support. The screen has clearly got Panasonic's JZ2000 home cinema hero in its sights, so what can it tempt us with? Quite a lot, as it happens...

Philips has long understood the importance of video processing to TV performance. It was throwing huge amounts of computational power at LCD TVs when LCD TVs were barely a thing, with typically excellent results (albeit once you'd tinkered with some of the settings). Yet the addition of OLED to its portfolio has seen processing prowess come into its own like never before.

The more high dynamic range (HDR) displays I’ve seen, the more convinced I’ve become that the only type of LCD TV that can comfortably handle HDR’s extreme light demands are those that use direct rather than edge lighting – ideally in conjunction with some degree of ‘local dimming’, whereby clusters of LEDs have their light output adjusted independently.