Philips Cineos 42PFL9632D

Hello there I'm standing next to a 42PFL9632D Ambilight TV from Philips, an impressive looking TV with some cunning tricks up its piano black sleeve. Lets get the regular business out of the way first. The 9632 has all the usual features you'd expect to find on a 1080p LCD TV. You'll find and integrated Freeview receiver, three HDMI inputs as well as component video and two SCART inputs. You'll also find a digital audio output. The TV also features a whole bunch of picture modes for improving the way programmes look. For example the Perfect Pixel HD Engine, while being a mouthful to say, performs tasks like motion smoothing and colour boosting and 14-bit processing. These names won't mean much to normal people, but there's probably someone in a lab somewhere who gets it. Although the picture processing is very good, we felt it made the picture look slightly over-processed at times, so we prefer to turn all the enhancements off. The good news, with all those settings dialled down to minimum the picture looks very good indeed. This TV will certainly appeal to those with high definition disc players or games consoles. The real trick of this TV though has to be the Ambilight. Designed to add an extra dimension to TV viewing it really makes a huge difference to your viewing as you can see. Oh, wait, you can't see. In order to demonstrate, I'll have to get rid of the office. Right, now for a bit of white, talk amongst yourselves for a second. Okay, so now you can see how the Ambilight works, basically, a series of LEDs project colours that are sympathetic to what is happening on-screen. This can work really well for some material, and badly for others. Movies tend to benefit quite a lot, but there are still times when the Ambilight produces light that doesn't feel totally natural. Anyway, I'm Ian Morris being bathed in the pleasant glow of the Ambilight on the Philips 42PFL9632D