Philips OLED909 vs Hisense U7S Pro

The Philips OLED909 impresses with the quality of its HDR effect, achieving up to 1500 nits of peak brightness in tested scenes. This is an excellent result, placing this television among the best OLED models on the market. The MLA matrix, also used in models like the Panasonic Z95A and LG G4, plays a key role here, allowing for exceptionally bright and detailed reproduction of dynamic scenes. However, it's worth noting that in the most demanding scene from the movie The Meg, the brightness drops to around 700 nits. This is a typical phenomenon in OLED technology, where intensely bright full-screen images cause a limitation of luminance. Nevertheless, the HDR effect still looks very good, and the television performs better than most competitors under similar conditions. The wide color gamut coverage also deserves praise. The OLED909 offers 95% coverage of DCI-P3, ensuring the television can display vivid and realistic colors.

Let’s start with the fact that the U7S Pro is an impressively bright TV — in calibrated mode our measurement equipment showed a staggering 2200 nits of peak brightness!

As we know, peak brightness on test patterns is one thing, and actual film scenes are another. Unfortunately, in real video material the backlight output drops noticeably. The TV can still exceed the 1000-nit mark in the most demanding moments — which is still a great result and fits the mastering standards of most HDR films — but the real challenge lies in the aggressively tuned local dimming algorithms. Because of them, small, bright details like stars or the moon in a night sky are noticeably dimmed. The TV tries at all costs to maintain deep black, which is understandable, but unfortunately this comes at the expense of HDR’s dynamic range and brilliance.

The color reproduction is worth praising. The new U7S Pro is a QLED design that provides very wide color gamut coverage. Unlike last year’s model (U7Q Pro), this year’s variant is a true QLED, not a solution based on a PFS filter. As a result, color saturation has increased noticeably, and coverage of the most demanding BT.2020 color space has topped 81%.

Like other televisions, the Philips OLED909 has been tested for color reproduction in factory modes. The best mode turned out to be Filmmaker Mode, but despite its name, it is not free of flaws.

The biggest problem is the white balance. Both in HD and 4K HDR content, there is a noticeable dominance of green and red shades, which causes a distinct yellowing of the screen. This effect is particularly visible in test materials, for example in the scene with Tom Cruise in the foreground, where the difference compared to the calibrated image is very clear.

Regarding brightness characteristics, the gamma in HD materials was boosted too much - it was below the reference value of 2.4, which gave the image a "milky" filter and affected the overall clarity. In the case of 4K HDR content, we noticed the opposite phenomenon – there is a clear drop at the beginning of the EOTF curve, indicating problems with reproducing the smallest details in dark scenes. Although the Filmmaker mode offers acceptable quality, noticeable errors in white balance and brightness characteristics show that the television requires additional calibration to fully reveal its potential in color reproduction.

We tested the U7S Pro, as we always do, in the best factory-tuned picture mode, Filmmaker Mode. The colors can be judged in two ways. The most disappointing was the profile intended for watching SDR content, i.e. traditional broadcast TV, YouTube, and other less demanding material. The image there was clearly yellowish, which turned out to be a direct consequence of a poorly set white balance. As our charts show, there's a large deficiency in the blue component, which drastically affected the overall color temperature. You can see this clearly on the ColorChecker charts and on the color gamut graphs themselves, where most samples shifted toward yellow. Fortunately, the factory HDR mode performed much better. There, color errors hovered around a Delta E of 3, which is a solid result.

Philips OLED909 offers tools for image calibration, which significantly improves its quality. After calibrating the Filmmaker Mode, the television presents a much more natural color reproduction. The white balance after calibration looks very good. Although we noticed slight deviations in the blue hue in HD content, the errors fall within acceptable limits, and the image looks much better than in factory settings. The brightness characteristics, including gamma and EOTF, have also been distinctly improved. The television no longer has issues with excessive brightening or darkening of the image. Both dark and light details are now rendered correctly, making the image look very good in every scene. After calibration, the Filmmaker mode in the Philips OLED909 offers excellent image quality that will meet the expectations of even the more demanding users. The calibration fully utilizes the potential of this model.

We know, however, that Hisense is capable of much more, as previous generations have shown, so we simply couldn't leave the U7S Pro's factory flaws in everyday content as they were. As always in such cases, we had the TV professionally calibrated. The result? The process brought a massive change. After manually correcting the white balance and filling in the missing blue component, the annoying yellow cast vanished as if it had been wiped away. Whites became naturally clean, and skin tones gained a proper, healthy hue. Importantly, the calibration not only tamed the finicky SDR mode but also squeezed the maximum potential out of the panel, reducing average color reproduction errors to levels almost imperceptible to the human eye. The only thing we still have to fault after the whole process is the nature of Mini-LED backlighting and its specific interaction with the HDR signal. Aggressively tuned local dimming algorithms quite strongly interfere with the EOTF luminance curve. As a result, the backlight doesn't always align with the creator's intent — depending on the scene, the curve can run noticeably above or below the reference, which in places disrupts the ideal dynamics of the HDR picture.

Philips OLED909 offers a distortion reduction feature aimed at smoothing tonal transitions. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of this feature leaves much to be desired. Setting it to "Medium" yields some results, but it comes with the risk of blurring essential details in the image. For this reason, we do not recommend using this option unless you are focused on mitigating visible artifacts at the expense of detail.

When it comes to image scaling, the television presents a very pliable image, which may appeal to viewers who prefer a softer image. Those expecting sharper clarity will also find a solution, as image scaling can be adjusted according to individual preferences in the settings.

The digital processing of lower-quality signals is top-notch here, thanks to the MediaTek Pentonic 800 processor used in the U7S Pro. Upscaling, the TV's ability to pull lower-resolution content up to 4K, also performs well. We didn't notice any unnatural, sharp contours on screen, and our test image with the model simply looked attractive.

The Philips OLED909 with a 144 Hz panel offers excellent image fluidity, which should satisfy both movie lovers and gamers. Additionally, the television is equipped with a smoothing feature called "Motion Style," which allows precise adjustment of image fluidity to personal preferences. In the settings, we find two sliders: "Fluidity," which regulates the fluidity of motion in movies, and "Motion Blur Reduction," which helps eliminate minor artifacts and distortions in dynamic scenes. This feature works well, making even fast movements on the screen clear and readable.

The Hisense U7S Pro uses a panel with a maximum 165 Hz refresh rate at 4K, and in game mode it can even reach 330 Hz at Full HD. However, it's worth remembering that those highest numbers don't matter much in everyday use, because most content still supports at most 120 Hz (for example when playing on a console). Even so, the TV handles motion quite well and performs well for an LCD design.

There's little to fault about the smoothness itself. In the menu you'll find a motion smoothing feature called "Motion Enhancement", which hides two sliders: blur reduction and judder reduction. They allow manual adjustment of the smoother, which works well for both movies and sports, effectively improving the raw TV signal.

The Philips OLED909 is a television that meets practically all the requirements of gamers. Equipped with ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode), VRR (Variable Refresh Rate), and support for Dolby Vision, it guarantees excellent gaming experiences. Additionally, the television offers very low input lag, ensuring that the response to player movements is instantaneous, which will be especially appreciated by fans of dynamic games.

The television easily supports any resolution at 120 Hz, and even higher refresh rates. The HGiG feature, responsible for the correct display of HDR content in games, works as it should, making the image in game mode balanced and tailored to the guidelines of console manufacturers.

The OLED909 also includes a Game Bar feature that allows for quick previewing and changing of game-related settings. Although the interface of this solution may seem less visually appealing than that of competitors, it serves its purpose well by offering all the most important options in one place.

If you plan to connect a console or PC to the U7S Pro, you'll be more than happy – this TV is great for gamers. Hisense spared no expense and put in four HDMI 2.1 ports with full 48 Gbps bandwidth. So you won't have to juggle cables, since every port supports the full feature set. There's automatic low-latency mode (ALLM) and VRR, which works across a wide range from 48 Hz up to a cosmic 330 Hz. Of course that 330 Hz is for now a gimmick for owners of powerful PCs, because consoles are capped at 120 Hz anyway, but it's good to have that headroom for the future. The Game Bar is also really useful while gaming. It's a handy in-game menu where, without leaving the TV's main settings, you can quickly change the picture mode, enable a crosshair in the center of the screen, or even switch to an ultra-wide aspect ratio, which PC sim fans will appreciate. The only downside worth knowing about is the incorrect implementation of HGiG in games. The TV ignores the console's instructions for HDR10 output and keeps forcefully altering the image, trying to "improve" it its own way. Because of that, properly configuring HDR in the console menu (where you set brightness using the logo/checkerboard pattern) is a bit more difficult.