HDTV Reviews

The guys at cnet have reviewed the Philips 42PF9631D and said that it is among the company’s least expensive Ambilight-equipped televisions yet, and since it costs about the same as other name-brand 42-inch plasmas, you’re not paying any more for the ‘lights–and you can turn them off. This HDTV has a solid feature set otherwise, and its distinctive style certainly increases its appeal. Testing revealed solid black-level performance and color that was a mixed bag, although we did notice a couple picture-quality issues that don’t plague other most plasmas or LCDs we’ve reviewed this year. That said, the image on the 42PF9631D will be perfectly fine for most viewers, and the rest of the package–especially the price–keeps it competitive.

Aside from Ambilight, the 42PF9631D offers a solid feature set. It has a native resolution of 1,024×768, as do most 42-inch plasmas. All material, whether HDTV, DVD, or standard television, is scaled to fit the pixels. You can choose to watch two shows at once, thanks to picture-in-picture and enjoy over-the-air digital and high-def shows via the ATSC tuner, which is common to almost every HDTV. Like many manufacturers, Philips did not include a CableCard slot, but that’s no big loss as far as we’re concerned.

on the Philips 42PF9631D is about average for a plasma in this size range. It includes two HDMI inputs; an analog A/V input that offers a choice of component-video, S-Video, composite-video, or RGBHV (the latter lets you connect a PC as well); an analog input with only component-video; another with S-Video or composite-video; an RF-style antenna input; a digital audio input and output; and an analog audio out. There’s also a side-panel A/V input with composite and S-Video alongside the USB port.

The Philips 42PF9631D delivered a decent overall picture, mostly owing to its ability to reproduce a deep color of black, but we did notice that its color appeared less accurate than it should have–although not terrible–and that some scenes caused it to exhibit false-contouring artifacts; others led us to notice unusual uniformity issues that detracted from the picture quality somewhat.