Philips announced its 2025 OLED TV, Mini LED and soundbar ranges yesterday, and in all of the excitement about four-stack OLED panels and next-gen Ambilight, one neat little gaming feature that I’m rather excited about got understandably overlooked. That feature is customised picture settings for individual games.
Yep, I hear you; most people just let their TV switch to its Game mode when they fire up their console. It shouldn’t surprise you, though, that I’m not that sort of person: I take the time to adjust all of the picture settings so that I’m getting the most authentic and accurate delivery of a game possible.
It’s tempting to think that game developers don’t care about such things, but these days, they very much do, and at the very least they will develop a game using monitors that are calibrated to D65 white point, which is ‘warmer’ than the tone used in the game modes of most TVs. If you don’t at least change that, you’re almost certainly not seeing the game anywhere near the way it was intended to be seen.
That said, there are times when I relax my self-imposed demand for accuracy in a quest for some extra ‘pop’. When I fire up Astro Bot, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart or Sackboy: A Big Adventure (which, as an aside, I heartily recommend to anyone who games with their kids), I want the bright highlights and vibrant colours to leap off the screen. I don’t mess with the colour temperature, but I often add a bit of extra brightness, contrast, and/or dynamic HDR processing.
When I switch back to something more ‘serious’, though, such as The Last of Us Part II or Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, those settings are all wrong. The gritty, realistic settings are given an unnatural punch, and detail is missing from the bright highlights and shadowy corridors. That simply will not do, of course, so back I go into the TV menus, tweaking several settings until I get the picture back to where it should be.
Philips, though, has a solution to this constant tweaking. Last year, its TVs allowed you to set up as many as 10 game ‘profiles’ with customised picture, sound and Ambilight settings, instantly reducing the amount of menu faff that a fussy fellow like me would have to endure. This year, it’s taking the concept further by apparently allowing you to customise your settings for individual games. And these settings will then be automatically applied whenever you fire up that specific game.
How will this work? I’ll level with you: I don’t know. My colleague Lewis Empson is currently on a flight back from the Philips launch in Barcelona and I’m hoping he can fill me in once he’s landed. I am slightly concerned about the press release’s suggestion that this feature might apply to just ‘the most popular games’, though, and would be disappointed if it was limited to just a handful of titles.
There’s another obvious gaming deficiency with the new Philips OLED range when it comes to gaming, too: with the exception of the entry-level OLED760, which features a lesser processor, all of the models have just two HDMI 2.1 sockets. As someone with a PS5, Xbox Series X and gaming PC, that’s a huge frustration that simply shouldn’t exist in 2025.
On the other hand, no other brand produces TVs with Ambilight, which is a particularly dazzling delight when combined with those extra-punchy, fast-paced, cartoony games.
In short, I’m very much looking forward to trying out the new Philips OLED TVs for gaming as well as movies and TV shows. Could they turn out to be among the best gaming TVs? Stay tuned for our comprehensive, comparative reviews in the coming months.
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