Philips 55PUS7502 UHD LCD Android TV with Ambilight – review

Picture quality

Picture analysis and calibration performed using SpectraCal Calman 2016 Ultimate for Business software, SpectraCal C6 colorimeter and VideoForge and Murideo SIX-G pattern generators.

Philips 55PUS7502 is an ISF certified TV, meaning that it has Day and Night picture presets with required controls to do a proper calibration. Along with these two presets, there are also Personal, Vivid, Natural, Standard, Movie and Game in SDR and HDR Personal, HDR Vivid, HDR Natural, HDR Movie and HDR game in HDR.

Picture quality you will see without ever touching picture settings is poorly adjusted in Standard mode, with too much blue, uneven gamma and oversaturated reds and greens along with the wrong hue of cyan and magenta. Luckily, there is much better picture quality available and all it requires is one visit to the picture settings. All you need to do there is a switch to either Movie (peak luminance 206.8 nits), ISF Day (peak luminance 338.5 nits) or ISF Night (peak luminance 244.5 nits). These presets, expect for a slightly too bright picture by default are very well adjusted with deltaE 2000 errors in greyscale below the critical level of 3 across the entire 0-100% signal range with 10% increments. Add to that accurate gamma and fairly accurate Rec.709 gamut tracking and you have one well-adjusted TV by default.

But, not everything is perfect.

Before we even placed measuring equipment on the screen, we were able to see a typical example of IPS panel. Color saturation remains good under angles, but blacks appear bluish grey and get glowing effect knows as “IPS glow” (see images below). Despite different options such as “Perfect contrast” and contrast modes optimized for picture quality, we saw again the old tricks just inside the new TV. For example, ANSI results can be improved if you wait a few seconds as TV will kick in so-called “frame” or “global” dimming to get better blacks but at the same time peak luminance will decrease significantly. In short, if you are after a TV with better blacks, consider some other model with VA or, in the ideal case, with an OLED panel.

Philips TVs usually have white level control (Video Contrast) maxed out, which leads to loss of details in bright areas. Before we were able to reduce it easily, but on 55PUS7502 this was not the case. No matter how much we reduced Video Contrast, the white level would stay 232 and reference white level is considered 235. We usually adjust white level so that even more level can be seen – up to 254. We believe this is a software issue which will hopefully be corrected through the software update.

On the other side, black level control was properly working and we were able to set it to make value 16 reference black.

Using available controls, we were able to further optimize greyscale and slightly modify color hue and saturation.

Once we switched to HDR patterns on Murideo FRESCO SIX-G pattern generator, we found HDR Movie to be the most accurate preset available. Using HDR Premium control, different tone mapping (highlight roll-out) can be achieved (Off – more details visible above 1000 nits, engaged brighter highlights but reduced the amount of details), though HDR performance is primarily limited by low peak luminance (max. approx. 450 nits) and low contrast of the panel.

We do not like the fact that not all picture controls are separated between SDR and HDR modes. This means that if you adjust white balance control in SDR for ISF Day, sample adjustments will be available in other presets. Same was before when Philips had 3D TVs in their lineup – 2D and 3D would share settings as well. It would be great to separate presets per input and per viewing type through future software updates.

Panel quality and backlight features

* – grades 1-4, 1 = bad, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent

Signal processing

* – grades 1-4, 1 = bad, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent

New P5 processor – technical presentation:

Picture quality – overall

* – grades 1-4, 1 = bad, 2 = average, 3 = good, 4 = excellent

Along with conducted tests who’s results are shown above, we watched a lot of different content on Philips 55PUS7502.

Starting with standard definition TV program (576i), the new Philips TV handles upscaling to native UHD resolution well, with accurate color palette and decent sharpness. Motion resolution is also good as IPS panel does not leave long traces behind moving objects, not even in when the scene is dark. However, the lack of proper de-interlacing showed its limitations here as we noticed flickering pixels on the edges of the objects, for example on text or angled lines. This was also noticeable in 1080i signals like Planet Earth II Blu-ray (1080i50) and we had to change input of our PlayStation 3 console to progressive to reduce the effect. Previous generations of Philips TVs also had this issue, but at least last year’s 65PUS7601 was properly de-interlacing film mode.

Noise reduction was equally efficient using new P5 processor as was with Perfect Pixel Ultra HD engine. The only area we saw an improvement was in MPEG noise reduction where P5 managed to more efficiently reduce banding and blocking than the processor before. TP Vision / Philips claims 50% performance improvement and “significant improvement in picture quality” with the new P5, but in reality, this improvement is, at best, subtle. However, we appreciate that company is improving is picture processing and sharing details about the improvements, as shown in the video above by FlatPanelsHD.

Switching to HD content like internet streaming and Blu-rays, the 55PUS7502 does a great job in upscaling with a lot of fine details in the picture, better than we usually see on Samsung’s or LG’s TV. The motion was also good, with 24p content being smoothly presented with barely visible judder. However, we could not see any improvement because of the new P5 processor as we sent the same signal from the PlayStation 3 over splitter to both 55PUS7502 and 65PUS7601. The latter was better overall since it is able to produce better blacks which make image more three dimensional with more pronounced colors. While watching Up in the Air, we were able to see more clearly different shades of black while George Clooney’s character was making connections between our lives and a backpack.

Finally, with UHD HDR content we were not especially impressed despite all the efforts to improve the dynamism of the picture with advanced HDR processing. The reason is simple – without local dimming, IPS screen can hardly show SDR content with sufficient contrast, let alone HDR that demands high peak luminance and deep blacks. There are, however, improvements in terms of color saturation as 55PUS7502 manages to cover more of P3 colorspace with more deeply saturated reds and greens. This made scenes from Planet Earth II on UHD Blu-ray more life-like and vivid, with more generous viewing angle than on TVs with VA panels.

We appreciate the fact that Philips is not forcing global dimming to show weaknesses of low native contrast of the IPS panel. If for any reason, you need this feature, you can activate it in “Contrast Mode” -> “Optimized for Picture” setting.