In summary
Sleek design, support for all the audio and video formats you could need and a swivel base: this TV has it all. There’s also Ambilight. What’s more, the image display is excellent and the HDR display is beautiful too, provided you can and don’t want to watch with a lot of ambient light. The sound is also above average and gaming performance is excellent. The downsides are that there are only two HDMI 2.1 ports and the power consumption, which is high by modern standards.
It was very common for televisions to come with an easy-to-use swivel base. This allowed you to turn the screen towards you or avoid annoying reflections in the image. Since the competition in the TV market is fierce, almost all manufacturers have reduced the swivel base over time, and only the Danish company Bang & Olufsen still offers expensive TVs that can be rotated (very luxuriously with the remote control!). With the more affordable brands, you had to arrange the stand yourself if you wanted to be able to adjust your TV. Fortunately, Philips’ new OLED, the 808, is once again equipped with a handy base on which the screen can be rotated.
Only the largest size, 77 inches, is, for understandable reasons, not equipped with a swivel base, but with separate chrome legs. In addition to the 48-, 55- and 65-inch models, there is also a modest 42-inch version on sale now. All variants are equipped with an OLED panel purchased from LG. Sizes starting from 55 inches are equipped with the EX variant which has a higher peak brightness and this means that it has a better HDR display, and of course, this TV is not missing Ambilight, where the color of the wall behind the TV changes with the image from three sides.
The 808 powers Google TV and the image processing uses the 7th generation Philips P5 Engine which of course uses AI to automatically adjust the picture depending on what is being shown and the ambient light. The new MediaTek Pentonic 1000 processor is used in the background. There is a 70W speaker system and there is support for Dolby Vision HDR with a maximum frame rate of 120fps for gaming. There’s also support for FreeSync Premium and Nvidia’s G-SYNC. At the time of writing, the 55-inch version of the Philips 808 we tested is listed on Pricewatch for around €1,800.