Philips Cineos 42PFL9632D review

Performance
Freeview performance on the Philips is good. The TV includes a number of modes to reduce MPEG compression artefacts. Mostly these are designed to conceal the blocking effect you sometimes see on moving objects. This is more of a problem on Freeview DVD because the bit rates are significantly lower than they should be. We opt not to turn this mode on because generally it works by softening the picture.

The same goes for the sharpening feature. We leave this off because it can give hard outlines a sort of halo effect, which isn't especially pleasant. We also strongly recommend you turn off the 'auto format detection' mode, which switches the screen in and out of the various widescreen and standard picture modes. It's absolutely useless, and kept changing the picture size at the start of some HD DVDs.

For the 100Hz ClearLCD mode, we tested it with the HD DVD of Hot Fuzz. This disc makes for excellent test material, because the transfer is second to none with lots of bright whites, deep blacks and very sharp fine detail. With the picture smoothing modes on, we noticed some artefacts around moving objects. Although everything took on a video-like smoothness there was image distortion as a result. We've seen this before on motion smoothing systems, so it's not just this set that suffers with it.

If you really can't bear the judder of film, you'll probably want to keep these film smoothing modes on. If you're a purist, or don't like artificial picture processing, you'll probably want everything turned off.

With all the trickery turned off, we have to say this TV produces an excellent picture. Our test material was exceptionally sharp and detailed. Hot Fuzz and The Matrix both looked awesome, although for quite different reasons. The TV also produces an incredibly bright picture with very natural colours.

Sometimes we felt that the blacks lacked detail, and the backlight was a little over-bright, which meant that in dark scenes everything looked a bit blue. Turning down the backlight takes care of the worst.

We also liked the sound quality of the set. Dialogue was clear, and easy to understand but at the same time, Philips has produced a TV that can deliver decent bass performance. While it's not as good as a 2.1 system, its good enough for day-to-day viewing.

Conclusion
The Philips produces an amazingly detailed and refined picture with natural colour, it also produces decent quality sound, which is always a welcome benefit on a flat panel TV.

It's probably fair to say that Ambilight adds to the cost of this TV. Although you can probably pick one of these up slightly over £1,400, the RRP is £1,800 so it will be up to you to decide if you think the extra features are worth a premium over a regular LCD TV. If you do buy this TV, we'll wager you won't be disappointed by the picture quality.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday