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Review: Polaroid P55D600

Introduction and features

Polaroid, the TV brand, tends to make headlines only once a year. When prices are slashed in the Black Friday sales, it's invariably a Polaroid panel rabid bargain hunters are photographed squabbling over.

Now the brand has moved up market with its first 4K Ultra HD panel, the 55-inch P55D600.

So should you be mentally counting down the days to this year's inevitable mark down?

Obviously, the Polaroid name comes with decades of imaging credibility. However any link between the TVs wearing the badge here and the American corporation famed for its instant cameras is slender at best.

The rights to use the marque on TV products in the UK is actually owned by retail giant Asda, and the 4K television reviewed here is manufactured for Asda by Vestel, the huge European OEM manufacturer.

Consequently, there's no correlation between Polaroid TVs on sale in the UK and those available in North America.

The screen itself is ostensibly well equipped though. It sports all the badges required by the canny 4K shopper, including Smart connectivity, 2160p resolution and 3D compatibility.

Inevitably though, there's plenty of devil in the detail.

Priced at £699, this Ultra HD flatscreen is aimed unapologetically at the lower end of the nascent 4K market - and I suspect it could end up in quite a few shopping trolleys as a result. If your cart is super-sized, there's a 65inch model as well, the P65D600, available for a mere £1,000.

Feeling flush? Buy both.

Connections and setup

Design-wise the P55D600 succeeds in being both smart and unremarkable.

It looks much like you'd think a modern TV should look. The bezel is moderately thin, but not outstandingly so, and there's a shiny chrome wrap around the edge of the screen which adds a certain bejazzle to the set. The TV stands on two edge-of-screen feet, rather than a pedestal.

These look like chromed metal but are in fact lightweight plastic.

The remote control is the standard Vestel-made click-wand (yes, it is very noisy to use), curved for ergonomic button-pushing. To save deep menu navigation, there are dedicated buttons for Netflix, YouTube, a web browser and media player.

Connectivity comprises four HDMI inputs. This is a goodly number and will be welcomed by gamers, however of the four HDMIs only one HDMI is 4K HDCP 2.2 compliant. This will likely restrict your options further down the road when 4K content services (such as BT Ultra HD, Ultra HD Blu-ray and SkyQ to name but three) become rather more commonplace.

There's also component AV input legacy support, a minijack for Scart (adaptor supplied), and a trio of USBs.

The screen will timeshift to a recorded USB hard drive hung off one of these ports, although as the set only has a single Freview HD tuner, this would prevent it being used for watching other tuner channels while recording.

In addition to a digital optical audio for use with soundbars and music systems, there's a subwoofer phono output for those that simply want to add a little beef to the box's audio output, by hooking up an active subwoofer. There's also a VGA PC input plus CI card slot for European PPV providers.

The P55D600 can be taken online via Ethernet LAN or Wi-Fi. The TV supports both 2.4GHz and the less congested 5GHz band. If your Wi-Fi reach allows it, opt for the latter.

Media hub options

If you have a large selection of networked multimedia, the P55D600 should certainly keep you amused.

Movie files, music and JPEGS can all be played directly though the set. An integrated Media Browser is presented as part of the main graphical interface. Icons for Videos, Photos, Music, Recordings and Settings make it pretty clear where you're going to end up.

The TV's media player will immediately identify compliant DLNA sources on your network, as well as any connected USB thumb drive. It does a fair job with most common video codecs and wrappers. File support covers MKV, MPEG, MOV, WMV and AVI.

The audio player handles MP3, WMA, AAC/M4a, PCM and WAV but it doesn't support FLAC. The latter omission will naturally silence video files using FLAC audio.

Smart TV platform offers limited catch-up

Polaroid's Smart Platform will be familiar to anyone who has auditioned other Vestel made TVs of a similar class (I'm thinking low cost models branded Toshiba and Finlux to name but two).

It combines a live TV window offset by a corral of apps. Headline attractions here include BBC iPlayer, Netflix and YouTube, supported by BBC News and Sport, Flickr, TuneIn radio, iConcerts, Accuweather, Dailymotion, Viewster and others of less interest.

There are also integrated Twitter and Facebook clients. Rummage around and you'll also find the Opera TV Store, which offers yet more viewing diversions, typically channels proffering movies in the public domain, streaming clients for anime services and so on.

The set's Freeview TV guide is somewhat basic, with no live TV window and no background audio.

Picture and audio quality

Straight from the box, this Polaroid set impresses.

Its images are sharp and snappy. Perhaps unsurprisingly, you won't find a surfeit of image manipulation on offer – just the usual selection of picture adjustments (Contrast, Brightness, Sharpness, Colour ), plus a variety of picture presets: Natural, Cinema, Game, Sports and Dynamic.

These are augmented by more advanced picture management tools like Backlight control and Dynamic Contrast.

The P55D600 doesn't offer additional high refresh rates or similar image interpolation tech, indicating that it's a tad lean when it comes to heavy image processing. As a result, motion handling is somewhat limited.

You can't influence the set's behaviour in regard, this is a basic 50/60Hz display.

On the plus side this means that there's no need to get het up trying to optimise screen settings for movies and sport. This is a one size fits all proposition. As it turns out, that's not necessarily a bad thing - there are no artefacts around moving objects and movies look like movies. Horizontal pans exhibit a little judder, but it's not excessive. Pictures are very cinematic.

The more I watched this modest Polaroid, the more I liked it.

The panel itself bristles with detail. In its multipurpose Natural mode, HD TV studio fare has real zing and Blu-rays are vibrant. When Edward Norton is gas canistered into The Incredible Hulk by William Hurt, he becomes a deep, trademark green, the assaulting army camos are lush and forestry.

There's also a genuinely precious lustre to golds and metallics. When Abe Sapien throws the missing part of the Elven crown to Prince Nuada (Hellboy II The Golden Army), thereby unleashing the steampunk army, the screen glints in appreciation.

The presets actually serve the P55D600 well.

Rather than try to drag the image down to near unwatchable dullness, the Cinema mode simply nudges down colour saturation and tweaks brightness. The end result suits low light viewing, without getting too contrasty.

But there are caveats.

In its default shipping condition, the TV has exaggerated edge-enhancement, presumably for extra snap when viewed at distance. Unfortunately, this looks fairly frightful at a normal viewing distance.

Sharpness should actually be set to zero. Anything higher simply introduces unwanted ringing artefacts.

It's also likely that you'll experience problems if you leave the set's Backlight Control in Auto mode. Uma Thurman's live burial, in Kill Bill Vol 2, is notoriously difficult to display. As the nails are hammered into her coffin and the light extinguished, the panel decided there's just not enough signal to warrant staying on and switches itself off. In fact, it goes on and off in quick succession, as she struggles in the darkness.

Switch the Backlight control from Auto to Low, and the panel stays awake.

Backlight uniformity is a little uneven, with pools of light in the corners and splotchy clouds caused by the set's lightguide. But I've seen worse on sets costing twice as much.

Local dimming is best described as unsophisticated. As a result, there's no pronounced backlight clouding around highlights, but equally those highlights aren't particularly bright either.

The set's 3D performance is 50/50.

That's to say, when half the screen is in focus and the other half is a forest of double imaging. This Polaroid features passive polarisation, which should be good news as 4K panels suffer less from the resolution sacrifice the technology requires. However, the implementation is extremely directional. You'll need to be absolutely square on to enjoy any type of 3D depth. The title text during the opening dream of I, Robot, looks as submerged as the occupant within the sunken vehicle.

Familiar 3D torture test Tangled is even worse.

The menu screen suffers from a bewildering multiplicity of floating lanterns and menu text. For what it's worth, brightness and colour reproduction during 3D remain good. The panel ships with no fewer than eight cheapo passive 3D glasses.

But, but, but...it's all too easy to forget these shortcoming when you kick back and actually watch some telly.

Proto HDR warfest Band of Brothers (Blu-ray) looks terrific. The heavily stylised cinematography, all high contrast and grain, is delivered with style and no obvious additional artefacts. Blacks are crisp against the snowy battlefield, motion is free of mpeg artefacts.

The great thing about the Polarioid P55D600 is that the pixel density encourages close quarter viewing. This is an easy image to like. I don't get the impression the set is doing anything other than a linear upscale, but the end result is really satisfying.

Significantly, the set also looks great with 4K source material.

There's no HEVC decoder, so the Netflix client can't offer Ultra HD streams. However, I hooked up a Sony FMP-X5 UHD media player which does has a Netflix 4K client, allowing me stream native UHD content into the Polaroid's HDCP 2.2 HDMI input.

Netflix original Marco Polo is a feast of fine detail. You can peer deep into crowd scenes, where edges remain clearly delineated at extreme close up. There's an enviable clarity to its images.

Sonically, the speaker deployment is conventional, with two downward firing stereo channels. The sound presets are actually quite comprehensive, with User, Music, Movie, Speech, Flat and Classic, augmented by detailed equalisation settings. Indeed, the software at work here outreaches the drivers and acoustic engineering in the set.

The audio is inevitably thin, making the set a prime candidate for soundbar augmentation.

Verdict

Budget 4K televisions are inevitably all about compromises and their success or failure is based on how the manufacturer balances these necessary feature-cuts.

And this Polaroid set actually does remarkably well at juggling its compromises.

The picture is the important part and even with a lack of image processing power inside it the P55D600 manages to display an impressive crisp 4K image.

We Liked

The P55D600 combines anonymous good looks with crisp, well saturated images. HD pictures benefit from the additional pixel density, and the set looks great with native 4K content.

We Disliked

The provision of a single HDCP 2.2-enabled HDMI input will limit your options when more 4K sources become available; no HEVC decoder means no onboard Netflix 4K.

Audio quality is thin, and the Smart platform is showing its age

The Final Verdict

Those looking for a cheap UHD television will find the Polaroid 6 Series ticks most of the right boxes.

It does a grand job with hi-def TV and Blu-ray, given the price, and looks as crisp as kettle chips with a native 4K source.

But there are, of course, catches.

The Smart platform looks dated, with limited catch-up options, and the 3D implementation is a bleary-eyed bore. And while four HDMIs seems generous, only one will serve you well with tomorrow's 4K UHD sources.

That said, come Black Friday, this will be a plum prize for big screen 4K bargain hunters. You might well want to camp out early.

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