Philips 55OLED+903 review – in pictures

THAT SPECIAL SOMETHING

Bigger screen, higher resolution, more apps… the chances are your new TV will have more of everything compared to the one it replaces. As one of the very few television manufacturers capable of having a unique selling point – its remarkable Ambilight technology – Philips has been offering a little more than most for quite a while. And the company has taken ‘more is more’ to another level entirely with the wholly remarkable 55OLED+903. As well as three-sided Ambilight, this OLED TV features an audio package designed by UK loudspeaker legends Bowers & Wilkins.

SLEEK AND SLENDER

Apart from the beautifully integrated soundbar sitting below the screen, the 55OLED+903 is basically all screen – which is exactly how you want it to be. The bezel surrounding the screen is minimal, and discreet in its metallic finish. The slender soundbar beneath is covered in an equally discreet dark grey cloth. And if you’re putting the Philips on a stand, its feet are tiny, weighty metal designs that add next-to-no additional height to the TV and manage to look expensively sophisticated while they’re at it. (They’re reasonably far apart, though, so make sure your rack or table-top is wide enough to accommodate them.)

URBAN CHIC

From the front, then, the +903 is a purposeful, confident looker. And in profile, it has that thrilling slimness that makes such OLED such an attractive proposition in the showroom. The top third of the Philips is almost impossibly slender – it only swells to recognisable TV proportions around the section that houses all the electronics and input sockets. This bulge also contains the left, top and right Ambilight array. So while it’s a stretch to suggest any TV looks like thousands of pounds-worth when in situ, the Philips 55OLED+903 ia about as urbane and decorative-looking a TV as you can currently buy. At any money.

CREATURE FEATURES

The headlines are obvious: this is a 4K UHD OLED TV, able to handle HDR content from the HLG broadcast standard to HDR10+ dynamic metadata quality. It’s fitted with three-sided Ambilight, four HDMI inputs, three USB sockets and a digital optical audio output. There is wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity on board, and broadcast TV can be accessed by either a DVB tuner or a pair of satellite tuners. All of the complicated stuff is taken care of by the second generation of Philips’ lauded P5 picture processing engine And, of course, there’s the Bowers & Wilkins-supplied audio package, which comprises a bass driver bolstered by a pair of low-frequency passive radiators that occupies a significant portion of the Philips’ rear panel. And up front, there are twin titanium tweeter/glassfibre midrange arrays firing forwards rather than downwards.

SCREEN TAKEOVER

The 55OLED+903’s on-screen interface and smart TV functionality is mostly the work of Android TV (Nougat). In truth, it’s not the most elegant or smooth interface a TV was ever fitted with – it occupies the entire screen, which is never a good idea, and is not all that easy to customise. It doesn’t carry all the UK’s catch-up/TV-on-demand services. Honestly? The SAPHI interface fitted to Philips’ less expensive 2018 TVs is preferable. At least Philips has got Android TV working stably – and it includes 4K content via its Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube Apps (the first two with HDR, too). And the eventual upgrade to Android TV (Oreo) promises Google Assistant built-in and Amazon Alexa functionality.

THE BRIGHTSIDE

There are just so many admirable aspects to the +903’s picture. The obvious place to start is with the black levels – slimness aside, it’s the no-backlight/pixel-off depthlessness of an OLED TV’s black tones that are the technology’s major selling point. It follows that contrast is deeply impressive. Even watching the credits of a movie is enough to demonstrate the +903’s ability to offer brightness alongside blackness without getting flustered. In between, colours are utterly lifelike and convincing – they’re vivid but not overblown, striking but not unnatural. And the Philips’ HDR performance is such that the detail and nuance of, say, a tree in full leaf is made explicit. The subtlety of differences in shade and tone is explicit, but not in an especially showy way. The +903 is simply a composed and accomplished television.

HAIR-RAISING SOUND

In every respect, the +903’s speaker arrangement leaves every other TV on the market in the dirt. For quiet, tension-packed scenes, the Philips sounds spacious and detailed enough to make your hair stand on end; during the crash-bang-wallop of a Hollywood action-movie set-piece it demonstrates the sort of dynamism and low-end presence that’s utterly at odds with the sound more usually associated with a big TV. Sound extends well beyond the physical confines of the screen, giving a real sense of atmosphere to a big sporting occasion, and the +903 is so well balanced it can do proper justice to a music video delivered via YouTube. It is rare a TV recommendation doesn’t include the caveat of more more money for an audio upgrade – but here is one.

PHILIPS 55OLED+903 VERDICT

Philips’ (and Bowers & Wilkins’) achievements with the +903 are considerable. It’s a handsome device, lavishly specified, and capable of stunning video and audio quality. If you have anything like this sort of money to spend on a new TV, you have to see (and hear) this one.