Introduction and features
- Update: With immediate effect, Philips has just slashed a huge chunk off the cost of this already pretty affordable 4K Ultra HD TV. Now with a price of just £749 - down over £150 from its £900 start point - this is one of the best-value UHD televisions around, especially with it's combination of 55-inch scale and smart TV prowess.
While the prices of 4K UHD TVs have plummeted over the past two years, they still generally command a significant premium over HD TVs. Philips, though, is out to change this, offering its 55-inch 4K UHD 55PUT6400 for just £749.
You might expect such an aggressively priced TV to feature a bland, plasticky, lowest common denominator design - but no. Instead its sleek, shiny bezel with its minimalist approach and acute angles sets quite a high-end tone, rounded out perfectly by a high-quality metal desktop stand.
The only sad thing about the 55PUT6400's design is that it doesn't carry Philips' always lovable Ambilight technology, where coloured lights spill out from behind the screen to accompany the images being shown onscreen.
Connections
The 55PUT6400 also does nothing to live down to its price with its connections.
Its four HDMIs keeps pace with anything the expensive end of the TV market has to offer, while the multimedia connections of three USBs and integrated Wi-Fi offer playback support for all the main video, photo and music formats (the latter from DLNA-enabled networked devices), as well as access to Philips' online services.
Happily these online services are now vastly more numerous than they have been on previous Philips TV generations thanks to the brand's adoption of Google's Android TV system.
This introduces in one fell swoop hundreds of apps, taking in everything from gaming and information to video streaming and content collation.
Android TV
To be honest, I question the usefulness of some, even many of the apps on offer via Android TV, and with that in mind I also wish the Android platform showed a better understanding of the sort of content and apps most TV users actually use regularly on their TVs.
Especially as Google doesn't currently provide you with any significant customisation tools with which you might have set up a customised 'home page' or 'home shelf' within the Android TV interface.
It's unfortunate, too, that while Android TV provides second-rate game apps galore, it doesn't provide any of the key UK catch-up TV services beyond the BBC iPlayer. And nor, at the time of writing, is there any sign of the Amazon streaming app, denying you one of the key sources of 4K UHD content with which to feed the TV's 3840x2160 pixel count (though Netflix 4K UHD IS supported).
I guess all the absent apps might turn up eventually, but you can never be sure until they actually appear.
At least the Philips implementation of Android TV runs fairly slickly, though, and doesn't seem to impinge on the running speed of the rest of the 55PUT6400's operating system (like it does with Sony's Android TVs). It's also nice to see that unlike Sony, Philips allows you to upgrade the memory available for downloading apps via USB storage device.
Picture features
It would have been easy for Philips to have just shoved a very basic picture engine into the 55PUT6400 in its bid to keep its price low, but actually it's fairly well specified set. The LED lighting is of the direct variety, where the lights appear behind the screen rather than around its edges - a configuration which usually leads to enhanced contrast.
The screen also employs a process called Micro Dimming Pro that breaks the picture down into thousands of small zones so that the picture processing systems can deliver more accurate results.
These processing systems - which take in everything from making motion clearer and reducing noise to boosting colour and contrast - are predominantly contained within Philip's Pixel Plus Ultra HD engine.
This is, it must be said, a relatively underpowered engine versus the Perfect Pixel system found in Philips' high-end TVs, but by the same token it's still more powerful than the sort of video processing systems you might expect to find on a £900 55-inch Ultra HD TV.
Performance
My first thoughts as I settled down to watch the 55PUT6400 do its thing weren't especially positive.
Out of the box, with all but the most pristine of native 4K UHD content its pictures just don't look very natural or involving, with too much evidence of various sorts of noise, as well as some slightly unnatural colours.
Fortunately I've seen enough Philips TVs over the years to suspect that many of these initial problems might be fixable. And so it proved, as a bit of time spent tinkering with various corners of the TV's picture processing settings quickly ended up producing much more satisfactory results.
For the record, the areas I'd recommend you spend the most time playing with are noise reduction (I'd suggest switching this off for all UHD and most HD content); the Natural Motion system (which should never be set higher than its lowest power setting, or else turned off entirely); the Contrast mode (which should be set to Standard rather than Best For Picture or Best For Power); the Ultra Resolution system (which I would recommend turning off for most content); and the Dynamic Contrast feature (which I would suggest you only use on its Minimum level).
4K excellence
With the changes above made, the 55PUT6400's pictures suddenly become not only more palatable but even, for much of the time, actually rather good.
They're particularly effective with native 4K content. With such an ultra-pure source the screen is able to give full expression to its colour, sharpness and, to some extent, contrast strengths.
Where colour is concerned the screen is capable of good levels of blend subtlety for such an affordable TV, meaning there's minimal evidence of the sort of striping and blocking artefacts you get with less able colour performers.
Nor is the impact of the 4K UHD resolution lost in any 'gaps' in the 55PUT6400's colour resolution.
Sharpness really is intense. This has long being one of the most potent parts of Philips' TV picture processing systems, and it results here not only in upscaled HD images that look sharper than most but also 4K images which even at times look slightly more than 4K!
Actually, with the Ultra Resolution feature active the sharpness can go too far, to the point where images start to look noisy. Turning this feature off, though, reduces (though not totally removes) the noise without excessively reducing the sharpness.
Motion handling
The 55PUT6400's sharpness doesn't reduce heavily when there's a lot of motion in the frame either - especially if you call in the set's Natural Motion processing on its lowest level (anything higher results in excessive artefacting).
Contrast is strong on the 55PUT6400 too for such an affordable set.
Black levels are engagingly (though it has to be said, not emphatically) deep, and the screen manages to retain good levels of uniformity in dark areas even when they sit right alongside bright ones.
There's a reasonable amount of punch to the bright elements in dark scenes too, showing that the screen isn't having to take too much overall luminance out of its images to deliver a convincing black colour.
Residual concerns
While the 55PUT6400's pictures are much improved by careful tinkering with the many set-up options, though, there are a few residual issues.
First, while you need to use the TV's dynamic contrast feature to stop dark scenes starting to look grey, this feature can also cause moments of distracting light instability, even if you stick with its lowest power setting.
Colours sometimes look a touch over-saturated in relatively dark parts of the picture too, and grainy source footage occasionally looks a bit noisy in a way I wouldn't have expected to find had the 55PUT6400 used a more powerful Philips processing engine than Pixel Plus HD.
The 55PUT6400's processing engine can cause some ringing around sharply contrasted object edges too, and I occasionally felt aware of slight vertical light inconsistencies during camera pans across bright content as well as traces of moire noise over some areas of very fine detail.
Standard def and gaming
I should say for the record, too, that the 55PUT6400 struggles a bit with standard definition content, tending in particular to lose colour accuracy as it tries to convert standard def sources to its native UHD resolution.
But then actually no 4K TV I've seen is entirely at home with standard definition content.
One last element of the 55PUT6400's picture performance to consider is its input lag - the time it takes for the TV to render images having received them at its inputs. My tests delivered a figure of around 50ms on average when using the TV's Game picture preset, which is a little higher than serious gamers would want to see.
Usability, Sound and Value
Although the Android TV OS runs more quickly and stably on the 55PUT6400 than it does on Sony's current Android TVs, it still doesn't feel to me like a very helpful interface overall.
Its recommendation system doesn't seem very effective, its layout seems rather random and inefficient, it doesn't seem specially well tuned to helping you find your favourite types of content, and worst of all it's hardly customisable at all.
The 55PUT6400's settings menus, meanwhile, do a solid job of trying to organise the huge amount of features they're tasked with carrying. But the fact that you have to spend such a long time in these menus trying to optimise the look of the TV's picture for different types of content doesn't do the set any favours where ease of use is concerned.
Sound
Philips is one of the best brands around for managing to get good amounts of audio power out of very slim TV frames, and this talent holds good for the 55PUT6400 too.
There's enough power, for instance, to ensure that the soundstage sounds large and involving without losing cohesion in its journey beyond the confines of the TV's bodywork. Voices sound credible and nicely rounded too, and the mid-range has enough space in it to move through a gear or two when requested by an action scene.
There's lots of detail to be heard too - though sometimes a relative lack of bass can leave this detailed exposed to the point where it starts to sound a touch harsh.
Value
This is, of course, one of the 55PUT6400's strongest suits.
There really isn't any 55-inch 4K UHD competition around at the £749 price level, so if that's your budget and you want to get the biggest 4K TV you can, then the 55PUT6400 is almost by default your only place to turn.
I would point out, though, that if you're willing to sacrifice five inches of screen size the stronger-performing Panasonic 50CX700 is now available for a little bit extra cash.
Verdict
Philips has kicked off its belated 2015 campaign in aggressive fashion with the 55PUT6400. It's the biggest 4K UHD TV we've seen for £749, and it backs that simple 'screen inches for your buck' appeal up by carrying both Google's latest Android TV operating system and one of Philips' renowned video processing engines.
The combination of this processing engine and the generally decent screen at the TV's heart ends up leaving pictures looking slightly unnatural a little too often for comfort, and requires you to revisit the picture set up menus pretty often.
The set is still good value, though - you just need to be prepared to commit to the set up legwork required to keep it looking its best.
We liked
The 55PUT6400 offers more screen inches per monetary pound than any other big brand 4K TV tested so far. It's also capable of delivering excellent pictures when it's set up right - especially with native 4K content.
It sounds better than you might expect from its slinky design too, and that design really is very easy on the eye.
We disliked
Various foibles with the TV's video processing engine mean you'll have to spend more time than usual tinkering with its settings. Also, no matter how much tinkering you do it's hard to stop pictures feeling just a little unnatural at times with anything other than the finest native 4K content.
Finally, while the Android TV interface introduces lots of apps, it's also cumbersome, dictatorial and lacking in focus.
Verdict
The 55PUT6400 is a striking debut for Philips' new TV range. It catches the eye with its price and size for a 4K UHD TV, and in many ways its pictures grab your attention too. Certainly it's capable of doing more justice to native 4K content than you might expect for its money.
In the end a few foibles with the TV's video processing make us think it might be a good idea to try and step up to one of Philips' slightly higher-end 4K TVs when they appear in the coming weeks.
But if £749 is your limit and you like your TVs big, then the 55PUT6400 at least warrants an audition.
from www.techradar.com
