March 7th, 2008Review: Philips 47PFL9532-98 LCD TV
The first choice for most TV purchaser these days is LCD. Whether it’s much better than what they need or whether it’s too classy for them, they want it. So in an age when every second person is preparation on getting an LCD TV and every fourth guy has one by now, how do you differentiate yourself from the crowd? Merely put, you go the American way: get a better LCD TV! Philips 47PFL9532/98, a 47-inch LCD TV that promises lots of features and very good picture quality.
Design
control any room smaller than a royal court, the Philips 47PFL9532/98 sits on a sturdy (and heavy) glass stand, measuring 1157 x 752 x 117 mm (W x H x D). It has an anti-reflective 47-inch (diagonal) full HD capable Active Matrix W-UXGA screen set in a black piano-finish panel that runs along all the sides. Here’s what it looks like at the rear.
Just below this panel are the twin speakers, hidden by a grille. The 47PFL9532/98 has a 2-channel Ambilight on its sides, and has an array of connectors and ports at the back to plug in all the other rudiments you’d need to construct a home theatre system.
Features
The TV has a 16:9 aspect ratio, and an anti-reflective screen. It supports a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080p. It has a good 3 ms response time and can display 4 trillion colors (14-bit RGB). The panel has a maximum brightness of 550 cd/m2, and a contrast ratio of 1200:1 (static) and 8000:1 (dynamic). It has viewing angles of 176 degrees (both horizontal and vertical). Philips has incorporated picture enhancement techniques like Perfect Pixel HD Engine, HD Natural Motion, 100Hz Clear LCD, and more.
Unique to Philips, Ambilight projects a soft light glow onto the walls around the TV set, which mechanically changes to match the colors and brightness of the picture. Ambilight improves perceived contrast, color, and feature, giving you the sensation that you’re looking at a wider picture. It has also been proven to reduce eye-strain by providing a more relaxing viewing experience.
ClearLCD technology involves the use of a scanning back light to kill motion blur, thereby producing incredibly smooth pictures. It mainly improves the black levels and eliminates speckles of background noise.
The Double Frame Rate Insertion in Clear LCD works at a refresh rate of 100Hz. It increases the raggedness of motion reproduction to more than twice that of a conservative LCD, resulting in a response time of 3 milliseconds.
Perfect Pixel HD Engine offers the unique combination of ultimate sharpness, natural detail, vivid colors and smooth natural motion on all qualities of HD, standard TV signals, and multimedia content for high-definition displays. All pixel of the incoming picture is enhanced to better match the surrounding pixels, resulting in a more natural picture. Artifacts plus noise in all sources from multimedia to standard television and also in highly compressed HD happy are detected and reduced, ensuring that the picture is clean and sharp.
Audio & Connectivity
The Philips 47PFL9532/98 uses two 8-watt (RMS) speakers for audio output. It also uses Digital Signal Processing, Dynamic Bass Enhancement, Virtual Dolby Digital, and BBE for audio excellence enhancement. You obtain a whole lot of connectivity options, including 3 AV ports, 3 HDMI ports, L/R In, S-Video In, Headphone Out, USB port, and analog audio L/R Out, along with a S/PDIF Out.
Multimedia
The TV sports a USB port at the side, where you can attach your USB Flash drive or HDD enclosed space, and play music and picture slideshows directly without the need for a DVD/DivX player. You can also upgrade the firmware for the TV via a USB drive.
Apart from this, the Philips 47PFL9532/98 has various features for convenience, including Child Protection, Auto agenda Naming, Automatic Channel Install (ACI), Automatic Tuning System (ATS), PLL Digital Tuning, four favorite lists, Auto Volume Leveler (AVL), an easy-to-use Graphical User Interface, a Settings Assistant Wizard, and many additional All these can be accessed using the large, full-function remote.
Performance
We tested the Philips 47PFL9532/98 by playing HD-DVD and Blu-ray movies, DVDs, and DivX files, using an Xbox 360 unit, a computer, and CAS TV transmission. The 47PFL9832/98 gave us good picture quality and color with honest contrast ratios. The images look lively and are a pleasure to view, but only if the input sign is of high excellence, which put the CAS connection out of the picture (sorry, no pun!)
As far as HD output is concerned, we tested it using a few HD videos, and the color, black levels, and detail in the images were brilliant. There was no pixilation or image noise either. The 3 ms response time is evident: there was no ghosting or streaking-in.
Connecting the computer to the TV is ultra-simple as long as you have a HDMI output on the PC or laptop, or at least a DVI-to-HDMI cable. The TV could be set to a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1080 when we used the computer. We played Call of Duty 4, Need for Speed Pro Street, and Crysis on it. The video excellence was really good, and the skill mind-blowing… but we did need a powerful graphics card to run the game at the LCD’s native resolution; we used two 9600GTs in SLI.
As far as cable TV is concerned, you’re all aware about the quality of the transmission, and the fact that the channels are scaled down to 4:3 during transmission. Scaling them back to 16:9 doesn’t make sense, as you lose a lot on signal quality, but that’s the only choice as of now. HDTV transmission doesn’t seem a realistic hope at least for the next couple of years. The twin 8-watt (RMS) speakers lack power. The audio quality was just above average, but lacks blow. You’ll definitely need to invest in good speakers if you want to perceive sound the action on this one.
The abundant connectivity options provided ensure that no home entertainment AV device gets left behind. Even after that, there’s space for some more at the back. We tried using the USB multimedia port for examination out some picture slideshows and to listen to some music. Well, pictures look really good on the big display provided they were shot using a high-resolution camera. As for music, the speaker aren’t good sufficient, like I said. Unfortunately, you cant use one other TV options when you’re using the USB port. And unlike the 42PF9831, this one doesn’t support DivX or MPEG, which is a major let-down.
If, then, you have the kind of room to accommodate a 47-incher, the Philips 47PFL9532/98 will set you back via around Rs 1,19,000 (it comes with a one-year warranty). In return, you get a humongous screen powered by technologies like Ambilight, Perfect Pixel, DNM, ClearLCD, and more — that enhance the video quality more than what you can imagine. However, remember that you’ll want to buy a separate sound scheme for it. We still say it’s worth it, considering 47-inch LCD TVs from other brands will cost at least 10 to 15,000 cash more.
