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Philips 52 PFL 9703 D
The Philips 52 PFL 9703 D TV is a 52" (132 cm) LCD flat-panel TV and came out in the fall of 2008 at a price of about 3,300 GBP.
Florian Friedrich, October 29, 2008
- Good contrast.
- Integrated ambient lighting system.
- Decent sound.
- USB and LAN connections.
- Picture quality is very dependent on viewing angle.
- Faulty 24p reproduction.
- The price.
The Philips 52 PFL 9703 D is a solid offering, with a winning combination of interesting design, eye-catching "Ambilight", appealing colors, and high-quality brightness and contrast. Despite HD signal processing weaknesses, the Philips delivers a handsome Blu-ray movie experience, if you are willing to overlook the slight image judder. Since the market price is significantly below the RRP, the Internet is your friend here and will probably save you a bit of cash.
The Philips 52 PFL 9703 D LCD flat-panel TV rewards buyers with an interesting extra, as the set comes fitted with the "Ambilight" lighting system. The "Ambilight" ensures that the area surrounding the TV is filled with soft illumination. This makes the contrast between the TV light and the dark surroundings less striking, allowing you to watch TV at night without needing a lamp to make it easier on your eyes.
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Here are some points of interest:
The biggest difference here from the first "Ambilight" TVs is that this model uses light-emitting diodes (LEDs) instead of fluorescent tubes, which provide a larger palette of available colors for both automatic and manual operation. "Ambilight" can even be used purely for mood-lighting when the TV is switched off. The lighting system adds a maximum of 34 watts to the set's power consumption during TV viewing, and if used alone, the lamps consume up to 60 watts.
Additional features include an analog/DVB-T tuner with level 2.5 Teletext, as well as USB and network connections. These allow the TV to display pictures (JPEG), music (MP3), and videos (MPEG1/2) from a memory stick, or content streamed directly from a PC. Unfortunately, photos are displayed in standard quality only, so finer details are lost.
In terms of connectivity, things look a little better. The Philips offers four HDMI sockets (3x back, 1x side), two Scart connections, a YPbPr input and a VGA input, as well as side-mounted headphone and S-Video connections.
The ambient light sensor, another nifty extra, allows the display illumination to be automatically controlled if you choose. The TV set has a modern design and comes with a pedestal. The casing is of stable construction and finished with a high-gloss black lacquer.
Operation
Strengths and weaknesses:
TV viewing is easy to control, thanks to the "Back" button, channel list and handy remote control, but the on-screen menu is less than satisfactory. Too often it covers the entire picture, making it nearly impossible to make sensible adjustments to the picture parameters.
In addition, functions that can normally be adjusted separately are irritatingly combined into one setting. For example "Contrast" only controls the contrast up to a value of 65, above which it controls the brightness of the backlight. This is something you are left to work out for yourself.
TV and DVD Picture Quality
If you demand a natural-looking picture, it is advisable to adjust the factory presets, as the TV picture has over-enhanced edges, smear effects during motion, and overblown contrast - even in movie mode. These result in a picture that looks anything but natural. It is therefore ever the more pleasing to see that, after adjustment, the TV delivers a well-balanced image with natural colors, easily legible scrolling texts, and tidy detail reproduction. Only roughly rendered color details - visible on various channel logos - still disturb the TV picture.
Picture material played back via the Scart input exhibits false edge effects and poor detail reproduction. If you have a set-top box that does not have an HDMI or YUV output, it is best therefore to connect it to the TV by S-Video. This should give a sharper picture. With TV images, the deinterlacing is accurate, but in movies there are sometimes fine line-flicker patterns during camera pans, while fast picture sequences generally demonstrate adequate performance. The "100 Hz Clear LCD" technology can only be activated when "HD Natural Motion" is also active, and adds some additional sharpness to fast-moving picture contents. However, during complex scenes there is some disturbance in the form of pixel noise. Make sure you do not adjust the contrast setting above 75, as this causes increasingly blurred motion.
The flat-panel TV shows a clean picture from DVD playback via HDMI, and even standard resolution (576i) HDMI signals are reproduced in good detail. If you input up-scaled 1080-line images from the DVD player, the TV plays these back without edge-cropping, making the picture a touch crisper. Sadly though, the 4:3 and letterbox picture formats are missing, so not all discs are suitable for 1080-line playback.
HDTV Picture Quality
The Philips presents some weaknesses when playing back HD material. For example, 24p signals displayed at 60 Hz judder slightly, as demonstrated by the roulette wheel during the introduction in "Casino Royale". Turning off the motion enhancement - "HD Natural Motion" - does eliminate this pulldown judder, but also disturbs the picture impression with extremely flat-looking movement and frequent pixel noise around the edges of moving objects.
We could not identify any deficiencies in sharpness. On the other hand, fine horizontal lines fray out like a zip if viewed close up. This causes no appreciable loss of detail in movie images, but does make fine texts in Blu-ray menus or in a PC image look unclean. At viewing distances of about two meters, however, these weaknesses are put into perspective. In that case, the Philips puts in an agreeable performance: The colors are rich, giving a more natural-looking Blu-ray picture overall.
Computer Operation and Sound Quality
Computer Operation:
The PC picture is not perfect. Fine checkerboard patterns are artificially sharpened even with sharpness set to minimum, and are therefore not produced totally accurately.
Sound Quality:
The powerful loudspeakers won us over completely, having spoilt us with clear and well-balanced sound for both speech and music.
Settings for the best home-theatre performance*
Smart Setting: Movie
Contrast: 74
Color: 55
Sharpness: 0
Noise Reduction: Off
Tint: Warm
Picture Format: Unscaled
Active Control: Off
Perfect Pixel HD: All options set to "Off"
* applied to realistic playback from HDTV/Blu-ray material through the HDMI interface in a darkened environment. Manufacturing and HDMI playback device deviations may necessitate slight adjustment.
Quick Points Summary
The design of the Philips is very attractive, and the "Ambilight" is a real head-turner.
The Philips also has something to offer on the side.
The clearly structured remote control feels good in the hand.
You are well-equipped for the future, with four HDMI connections.
TV and standard signals look good on this Philips.
The speakers provide quality sound without exception.
The HD playback show weaknesses but compensates for them with rich colors.