Reviews: PHILIPS 42PF9631D reviews- 42" Widescreen TV at a glance. Wide choice, best prices; 42PF9631D
Digital TV doesn't get much better than 42PF9631D! Enjoy the ultimate viewing experience of this Philips Cineos Flat TV with Pixel Plus 2 HD, the latest LCD technology and table-top stand. The Digital Media Reader via USB gives you full access to multi-media content. Add to this the ability to directly connect your computer via the VGA input and you have a complete home entertainment solution.
Save space and enjoy a wonderfully vivid picture with the stylish, 42-inch Philips 42PF9631D/10 widescreen LCD TV. It has a built-in analogue tuner for standard television broadcasts in addition to an integrated Digital Tuner for DVB-T reception. It features Philips' Pixel Plus for better detail, depth and clarity, which combines a whole range of enhancements to provide a better picture, including a dynamic contrast, blue stretch and green enhancement for the most natural looking colours. This set includes a tabletop stand, but it's also wall-mountable with optional kit (VESA compatible).
The 42PF9631D/10 has a 1024 x 1080i-pixel resolution, 176-degree viewing angle, a 1400 cd/m2 (candela per square meter) brightness rating. Other features include progressive scan, 3D comb filter, Digital Natural Motion, Jagged line suppression, Widescreen plus, Pulse Killer Chip, Dynamic contrast enhancement, Active Control, Clear LCD, Pixel Plus 2 HD, 3/2 - 2/2 motion pull down and an anti-reflection coated screen
The 3D comb filter separates brightness and colour signals better in 3D domain to eliminate cross-colour, cross-luminance and dot-crawl distortion. It performs field-by-field comparisons of the television image to accurately separate the colour from the black-and-white information and remove both horizontally and vertically hanging dots, as well as dot crawl, resulting in a razor sharp image. This set also performs 3:2 pulldown detection and reversal, too--a handy feature for watching progressive-scan movie programs in their native 24-frame format. To adapt 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video, frames in the original movie must be duplicated; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this duplication by removing the redundant information to display a frame-accurate picture.
This TV has four built-in powerful stereo speakers that produce 15 watts per channel (for 30 watts of total power). Philips' Incredible Surround audio technology dramatically magnifies the sound field to immerse you in the audio. Using state-of-the-art electronic phase shifting, Incredible Surround mixes sounds from left and right in such a way that it expands the virtual distance between the four speakers. This wider spread greatly enhances the stereo effect and creates a more natural sound dimension--without the use of additional speakers.
It also includes the following connections: Ext 1 SCART: Audio L/R, CVBS in/out, RGBExt 2 SCART: Audio L/R, CVBS in/out, S video in, RGB outExt 3 : YPbPrExt 4 : HDMIExt 5 : HDMI Other connections : Analogue audio left / right out, S/PDIF in (coaxial), S/PDIF out (coaxial), Common Interface, PC in VGA & audio L/R inFront / Side connections : Audio L/R in, CVBS in, Headphone out, S-Video in, USB, Number of SCARTS: 2
HDMI makes an uncompressed digital RGB connection from the source to the screen. By eliminating conversion to an analogue signal, it delivers an unblemished image. The non-degraded signal reduces flicker and leads to a clearer picture. HDMI intelligently communicates the highest output resolution with the source device. The HDMI input is fully backward compatible with DVI sources but includes digital audio. HDMI uses HDCP copy protection.
In case you hadn’t noticed, HD DVD vs Blu-ray is not the only vicious format war currently raging within the AV industry. For also currently tearing chunks out of each other are LCD and plasma flat TV technologies. In fact, this screen war has just been kicked up a gear by Hitachi, Pioneer and Panasonic, who’ve actually joined forces to remind the public of the supposed strengths of plasma over LCD technology via a barrage of in-store materials and an in-depth, pull-no-punches website: www.plasma-lcd-facts.eu.
While a good format war always gives us hacks plenty to write about, it’s always a relief to find a few brands that prefer to stay neutral by supporting both camps. And one of the most high profile of these neutral players is Philips. In fact, Philips’ refusal to choose one flat TV option over the other even extends to the most heavily contested size of the flat TV market: 42in. So while we’ve already tested a Philips 42in LCD TV, the 42PF5421, we now also find ourselves faced with a 42in Philips plasma TV in the form of the 42PF9631D.
The $64,000 question, of course, is whether Philips’ egalitarian gesture of allowing Joe Public to decide which format of 42in TV he wants is really worthwhile, or whether the brand does one technology so much better than the other that it really might as well stick with what it does best…
The 42PF9631D is certainly no half-hearted effort aesthetically. The deep, glossy black screen frame is really eye-catching, and provides the perfect counterpoint to the set’s most in-your-face feature: Ambilight.
If you’re not familiar with this, it comprises fluorescent tubes down each side of the TV that can emit pools of light that automatically change colour in sympathy with the main colour components of the picture at any given time. This sounds horrendously gimmicky, we’ll grant you; but honestly, as well as looking cooler than you might think, it also genuinely makes long-term viewing more relaxing by broadening the area of brightness that your eyes are focussed on.
Another key – if more controversial – feature of the 42PF9631D is hinted at by a curious claimed native resolution of 1,024 x 1,080i. On the one hand this resolution looks pretty exciting with its ‘full HD’ 1080 line count. But then it also looks rather puzzling with its mere 1024 vertical rows when a proper full HD picture would have 1,920. In fact, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this TV is nearly square rather than widescreen (though it isn’t, of course).
The reason for this resolution curio is something called Alternate Lighting of Surfaces – or ALIS for short. As briefly as possible, ALIS combines an expanded phosphor area with electrodes that light the area between the pixels as well as the pixels themselves to deliver a perceived interlaced resolution of 1080 lines, even though the actual pixel count is only half that.
Admittedly this sounds a bit dodgy when you strip it down as far as we just did - and there’s no getting round the fact that since the vertical rows only number 1,024 rather than 1,920, HD pictures are still going to have to be processed and resized more than they would be for a true 1,920 x 1,080 TV. But the system is deemed good enough by the industry to earn the 42PF9631D its HD Ready wings.
Another initially confusing feature discovery is Pixel Plus 2 HD image processing when other Philips TVs now use Pixel Plus 3 HD. But actually this merely marks the 42PF9631D out as a mid-range set, since it has become common practice for Philips to use different generations of Pixel Plus as a means of differentiating sets across its massive flat TV range. That’s not to say, though, that we won’t still feel the loss of the new noise reduction systems Pixel Plus 3 HD brings to the table.
Other features worth a quick mention include a built-in digital tuner with all the CAM slot and electronic programme guide trimmings; two HDMIs; PC connectivity; and USB ports for direct playback of JPEG or video file formats stored on USB devices.
And so to the moment of truth: does the 42PF9631D’s plasma picture hold up against its same-sized LCD counterpart? And the answer is... just barely.
Kicking off with the good stuff, colours immediately strike us as unusually radiant by plasma standards. The effervescent tones of an animated film like Monsters Inc. look simply dazzling, as do many HD games on our Xbox 360. But even fairly mundane TV and movie footage gains lustre from the 42PF9631D’s apparent mission to be noticed on a shop floor among all the bright young LCD things.
Of course, such colour vibrancy wouldn’t be much use if the tones underlying it weren’t natural. But for the most part they are, as the set even passes with flying colours – pun intentional – such a trickily toned sequence as the Mines of Moria segment of The Fellowship of the Ring. 42PF9631D Trusted Reviews
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