Philips 42PFL9803

Hello I'm Ian Morris and this silvery delight to my right is the Philips 42PFL9803 an TV that joins a fairly small group of screens that can claim to use LED backlights. Philips claims that this means this TV can achieve contrast ratios of two million to one. A bold claim, so lets have a look at what this TV does and how it performs.

The first thing we think we should say is that this TV is £2200. I'll just give you a chance to pick yourself up off the floor. Now with that bombshell dropped, we'll get on with explaining why.

The main reason for such a steep price is the LED backlight we mentioned earlier. The second is that it features Ambilight Spectra 2 and Philips most capable picture processing mode, known as Perfect Pixel HD, which can process a massive amount of on-screen information almost instantly.

Whatever the reasons, Philips has compensated for the high price by designing a TV that is visually stunning. This brushed metal bezel is quite striking, and we think this TV would look fantastic in your home. The TV also has pretty much all the connections you could desire. At the back there are three HDMI sockets, and there is a fourth here on the side. Obviously component, scart and VGA sockets are provided too.

The remote control may be the same colour as the TV, but it's made of reasonably cheap plastic and we found ourselves yearning for something like the Pioneer remote control, which is made with real metal that a burly bloke has dug up from a dingy mine. The rotating clicker is also a cause for irritation at times, it's just too easy to scroll past the menu setting you wanted to select.

We think the LED backlight is the most interesting aspect of this TV. In a normal LCD TV the illumination is provided from behind the panel by a series of cold cathode florescent tubes. This TV, however, has arrays of LEDs that produce the backlight. In fact, there are eight rows, each made up of 16 segments. In total there are 1,152 individual LEDs behind here. The advantage of using LEDs is that the segments can be dimmed independently. That means that one half of the TV could be showing bright white, and the other, deep black. Something that wouldn't work especially well on a traditional LCD TV.

The 42PFL9803 is a strong performer overall. There were some minor picture performance issues that made us think this technology needs improvement. The main problem is a halo of light that is sometime visible around bright objects on a dark background. Even so, dark areas on-screen really do look amazing with this TV, and the colour is fantastic.

Like all high-end Philips TVs, this model also features the front firing high end speakers concealed within the bezel of the TV and at the rear, a pair of woofers, which add to the low frequency sounds that give action movie soundtracks that much needed punch when something explodes.

At this price though, the 9803 really needs to be on the same level as the Pioneer LX-5090, which is our current reference TV. We don't think Philips is quite there yet, but in the same way it has recently improved it's innovative Aurea TV, we think, next year, this technology will have come on in leaps-and-bounds.

Until then, if you want a stylish TV that has incredible contrast and very good overall picture and sound quality, then this might well be the model for you. It's not perfect, but it is one of the best LCDs we’ve seen recently.

I'm Ian Morris for CNET UK, and this is the Philips 42PFL9803.