Philips OLED759 review: A consummate entry-level OLED

We’re always keen to get our hands on TVs like the Philips OLED759 as not everyone who wants a premium gaming, TV or movie experience has a massive living room or a bottomless bank balance. The OLED759 is a model that offers the self-illuminating charms of OLED at an accessible price and is available in a wide range of popular screen sizes.

The OLED759 becomes more appealing when you realise that, despite its relative affordability, it retains Philips’ unique Ambilight technology, packs a 4K resolution, has 120Hz gaming support and can play the best version of any content you feed it thanks to universal HDR support.

Philips OLED759 review: Key specifications

Philips OLED759 review: What you need to know

The Philips OLED759 is the most affordable OLED model in the brand’s latest TV range. It’s available in four screen sizes: 48in, 55in, 65in and 77in, and I’m reviewing the smallest of the quartet here. I picked out the 48in model because its screen size appeals to a different demographic than the bigger TVs that typically arrive on our test benches.

While the OLED759 is still a premium proposition compared with the brand’s LCD models, it lacks some of the bells and whistles you get with Philips’ step-up OLED809, OLED909 and OLED+959 series. 

Its panel doesn’t benefit from the micro lens array brightness-boosting technology of the OLED909 and flagship OLED+959, for instance, or the ‘EX’ enhanced phosphor technology of Philips’ OLED809. It also swaps out the Google TV smart systems of Philips’ step-up OLED models for the relatively new Titan OS and features a relatively chunky design.

The OLED759 does hold on to some other key Philips TV features, though. It’s bolstered by the presence of Philips’ Ambilight technology, runs the brand’s P5 Engine processor, and supports the ‘big four’ HDR formats along with key video gaming features including 4K@120Hz and VRR.

Philips OLED759 review: Price and competition

The OLED759 is pretty aggressively priced for an OLED TV, with the 48in model reviewed here costing £849 at the time of writing. For context, the LG C4 and Philips OLED809, both of which use more premium EX panels, cost £200 more. However, the LG B4, which is closer in panel spec to the OLED759 but lacks universal HDR support and Ambilight, is slightly cheaper at £799.

If you have the space for it, the 55in OLED759 only costs £999 – £150 more than the 48in model – while the 65in and 77in models will set you back £1,199 and £1,799, respectively. 

Philips OLED759 review: Design, connections and control

From the front, the OLED759 delivers a striking combination of subtle elegance and colourful exuberance. The subtlety comes from its ‘barely there’ screen frame, together with its pair of blade-style satin chrome feet, while the exuberance comes from Philips’ Ambilight technology.

Ambilight sees bright LEDs arranged around the left, right and top edges of the TV’s rear, throwing coloured light onto your walls. That light can either be a constant single colour of your choosing or can track the positions and tones of different colours in the picture you’re watching. The colours emitted can even compensate for different wall colours.

Even on this relatively affordable Philips OLED TV, Ambilight can be either an eye-catching showboater or a subtle enhancement, depending on the Ambilight settings you choose. I toned down both the brightness and the aggressiveness with which Ambilight responds to changes in content to stop it from becoming distracting. But the tools are provided to make Ambilight pretty much whatever you want it to be.

The OLED759’s rear is a little untidy. At its edges, it’s phenomenally thin – well under a centimetre deep. And these super-slim areas enjoy a lovely polished metal backing plate, too. However, a large portion of the rear panel protrudes way further than the rest, making it slightly cumbersome for hanging on a wall.

Connectivity is excellent, however. All four HDMIs can handle 4K/120Hz gaming graphics, variable refresh rates in both the AMD Freesync and NVidia G-Sync forms and auto low latency mode switching. There’s also support on one HDMI for the eARC/ARC functionality that lets you pass lossless Dolby Atmos sound to eARC-capable soundbars and AVRs.

The HDMI connections are capable of taking in the HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision HDR formats, ensuring the TV can always deliver the best available format of any content you play into it. Other connections include two USB-A ports, a Freeview HD tuner input, plus Bluetooth and Wi-Fi wireless support.

You can control the TV using the provided remote control. You can also talk to it, thanks to its built-in Amazon Alexa support and ability to work with external Google Home devices. The remote control looks stylish and features a sensibly stripped back button count, but its edges are a bit sharp and, worse, putting the OSD’s cursor movement buttons in a small diamond-shaped area with a large, sharply raised circular ‘Select’ button at its heart makes pressing each direction key quite uncomfortable.

Philips OLED759 review: Smart TV platform

Unlike Philips’ more premium OLED TVs, the OLED759 doesn’t use the Google TV smart system. Instead, it turns to the new Titan OS. This acquits itself reasonably well for such a relatively new kid on the block. Its interface is quite graphics-rich but also puts loads of direct content and app links on screen at once. This can feel a touch overwhelming initially, but once you get used to its simple shelves of popular or promoted shows, it’s just a case of scrolling down to the apps you most care about.

The shows presented on these shelves are updated regularly enough to keep things feeling fresh, and the system is sophisticated enough to include your recently watched shows with most services.

I didn’t detect a great deal of ‘tailored to your viewing history’ intelligence in the Titan OS recommendations system, and while most of the big streaming services are present, I couldn’t see Apple TV+. The TV crashed a couple of times while I was reviewing it, too. Overall, though, Titan OS proves a more than fair smart system for the OLED759’s money.

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Philips OLED759 review: Image quality

Despite being Philips’ entry-level OLED TV, the OLED759’s standard dynamic range picture presets include an exceptionally wide-ranging set of options. The default Crystal Clear preset, for instance, delivers SDR with a white level of 477cd/m2, compared with the 269cd/m2 you get in the accuracy-focused Filmmaker Mode.

Delving into the TV’s menus reveals that there’s a very good reason for the relatively aggressive approach of the OLED759’s Crystal Clear mode: namely that it deploys a ‘Perfect Natural Reality’ feature designed to turn SDR into HDR. Philips isn’t the only TV brand to deploy such a conversion system, but for the most part, I was pleasantly surprised by how effective it is.

Not least because while it greatly boosts the brightness and intensity of the lightest peaks in an SDR picture, it doesn’t try to do so much with more ‘regular’ parts of the picture that they become peaky or unnatural. The bright peaks don’t look too extreme either; they still feel as if they belong with the rest of the picture, rather than looking like over-stressed digital augmentations. In fact, in this respect, the OLED759’s SDR to HDR transformation arguably works more effectively and consistently than similar systems on Philips’ step-up OLED TVs.

The best aspect of the OLED759’s SDR to HDR transformation in Crystal Clear mode, though, is how well the system expands the colour range and saturation. This ensures that bright parts of the picture don’t look washed out, and gives you a sense of the wider gamuts used for almost all HDR mastering without tones – even skin tones – becoming unbalanced or unnatural.

This is backed up by further measurements of the Crystal Clear mode using Portrait Displays’ Calman Ultimate software, G1 signal generator and new C6 HDR5000 colorimeter. Accuracy tests for two-point and multipoint greyscale, gamut coverage, colour tone precision and both saturation and luminance sweeps return DeltaE 2000 average errors across the board of between 3.5 and 6.5. None of these scores count as excessively far out when you consider that the TV is converting SDR into HDR by default.

There are still one or two things you will want to tweak in Crystal Clear mode. The default Smooth motion processing option is too strong, for starters; either turn it off or else try the Pure Cinema option if you want to take a little edge off the panel’s default judder without losing that 24p feeling.

You should also reduce the strength of the noise reduction processing. While I’d normally suggest simply turning this off, on the OLED759 you need to leave it on its lowest setting to stop the upgraded picture from looking a bit ‘fizzy’.

So effective is the OLED759’s Crystal Clear mode that switching to Filmmaker Mode initially feels like quite a shock. And not in a good way. Images look significantly flatter and less dynamic, and colours are much less heavily saturated. So much so they actually look washed out at first comparative glance.

Once you get over the initial shock of just how much less punchy the OLED759’s accurate pictures look, though, you quickly start to realise that there’s a lot to like about them. There’s a beautiful new balance to things in terms of both colour tones and shadow detail in dark areas.

There’s no noise in the Filmmaker Mode pictures either, and the presence of more subtlety in colour definition and that more nuanced shadow detailing helps create an immersive and three-dimensional quality that compensates handily for the lack of raw impact versus the Crystal Clear mode. Perhaps because of this I also became aware of how effectively and cleanly the OLED759 upscales HD sources to 4K ones in the Filmmaker Mode than I did with the Crystal Clear mode.

The SDR Filmmaker Mode’s pictures achieve outstanding accuracy with our Calman Ultimate test signals. In a world where DeltaE 2000 errors below three are considered imperceptible to the human eye, a multipoint greyscale check delivers an error average of bang on three. A gamut check delivers a typical error of just 1.9 (and 98.7% of the Rec709 colour gamut), a colour point check produces an average error of just 2.5, while saturation and luminance colour sweeps suffer with just 2.3 and 2.2 error levels respectively.

Skin tones can look a touch too pale, maybe because the Filmmaker Mode still feels like it’s tracking a touch brighter than it should. I preferred to turn the set’s motion processing off for Filmmaker Mode rather than leaving the default Movie setting on. Overall, though, provided you make one or two minor settings changes, the OLED759’s SDR pictures are engaging no matter what mode you watch them in.

Philips OLED759 review: HDR picture quality

The OLED759 supports all four key flavours of high dynamic range video: HDR10, HLG, HD10+ and Dolby Vision. And it gets good results with all of them – so long as you can live with the fact that they’re not nearly as bright as the HDR pictures of the latest EX and, especially, Micro Lens Array OLED panels.

I measured a peak brightness of around 810cd/m² on an HDR test window covering 2% of the screen, dropping to around 700cd/m² on a 10% HDR window. These numbers are almost 500cd/m² down on the 2% peaks delivered by Philips’ step-up OLED809 and more than 300cd/m² down on the OLED809’s 10% window measurements. I was able to clearly and instantly appreciate these differences with the naked eye, even in the OLED759’s HDR Crystal Clear and Dolby Vision Bright modes.

Aside from making HDR a slightly challenging watch in a very bright room, the relatively subdued brightness is pretty much where the set’s HDR bad news ends.

Colours look natural, full of nuance and subtlety and impeccably balanced, especially in the Dolby Vision Bright and Dolby Vision Filmmaker Modes. It’s not surprising to measure the OLED759 as covering 98.7% of the DCI-P3 colour spectrum commonly used for HDR mastering, as well as 75.1% of the Rec 2020 HDR range.

The strong sharpness and clarity seen with upscaled HD content become a richly textured and brilliantly three-dimensional display of detail with true 4K content. There’s an extra level of subtlety and range to the image’s rendering of light right across the available light spectrum than the SDR to HDR conversion system can manage (impressive though that is).

Care needs to be taken again with the motion processing and noise reduction systems (I would recommend turning the latter off completely with native 4K), but otherwise, it’s hard to see what more you could reasonably expect from the HDR performance of such an affordable OLED TV.

To test the Philips OLED759 we used Portrait Displays Calman colour calibration software.

Philips OLED759 review: Gaming

The OLED759 is an excellent gaming display. It ticks far more cutting-edge gaming feature boxes than I’d expected it to for its money, including 4K/120Hz and variable refresh rate playback on all four HDMIs, support for both the AMD Freesync and Nvidia G-Sync VRR formats and a dedicated Dolby Vision HDR game mode.

You can also call up a dedicated menu when gaming to display key information on the gaming signal, as well as give you access to a few gaming aids, such as a superimposed crosshair and the ability to raise the brightness of dark areas. The screen auto-detects game sources and switches into its game mode, in which I measured input lag at 13ms.

The combination of this low input lag, OLED’s innate responsiveness and the fact you’re gaming on a fairly small screen by today’s TV standards contributes to a fantastically responsive, fluid and slick gaming experience – especially at 4K/120Hz with VRR.

The screen renders graphics beautifully for the money, too, delivering a gorgeous combination of rich colours, ultra-crisp detailing and stellar contrast that does justice to the stunning visuals today’s latest consoles and PCs can provide.

The only issue is that very occasionally – such as during Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6’s game menus – the screen’s baseline brightness can flicker a bit. This hardly ever happens during actual gameplay, though.

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Philips OLED759 review: Sound quality

The OLED759 features a relatively simple 2 x 10W speaker configuration which, unlike the speakers in TVs higher up Philips’ OLED range, hasn’t been designed in conjunction with hi-fi brand Bowers & Wilkins. The TV does still play Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks, though, as well as MP3, WAV, AAC and FLAC music files. There’s even support for the DTS Play-Fi wireless audio system.

The OLED759’s sound can’t get as loud as you might like for movie nights. It does, however, have enough power to develop a pleasingly large soundstage, especially with Dolby Atmos mixes. Even better, it delivers specific placement effects, transitions and ambient effects with a good mix of clarity, balance and positional accuracy.

Dialogue is always clear and seems to emanate from the screen area rather than somewhere below it, and while the speakers don’t have enough headroom to shift through many gears as an action or horror scene grows in intensity, at least the sound doesn’t fall away when the going gets tough.

Very deep bass rumbles can cause some chuffing and crackling distortions to disturb the otherwise pristine presentation. Bass frequencies heavy enough to cause these problems are rare, though, leaving the OLED759 typically sounding nicely above par for its price point.

Philips OLED759 review: Verdict

The OLED759 is a consummate entry-level OLED TV. It inevitably lacks some of the sparkle and jaw-dropping picture and sound impact of Philips’ more premium OLED models but still delivers OLED’s key attractions of fantastic black levels, pixel-level contrast control and ultra-refined lighting.

In fact, the innate brightness limitations of its panel arguably lead to a picture that needs less effort to look its best than some of Philips’ more aggressive sets. It also sounds detailed and engaging most of the time, and manages to be one of the most well-featured and flat-out fun gaming displays I’ve come across for less than £1,000.