We expect TVs like the Philips 56 PFL 9954 H to justify their price with varied connectivity and multimedia extras, as well as by doubling up as a PC monitor. In this section of our review, you'll discover what this TV does well and where its shortcomings lie.

Connections:

The rear connections panel offers a large number of sockets. The five HDMI inputs (four on the back, one on the side) earn special mention - no TV we've tested so far has offered this many. You'll therefore have no problem hooking up even large device-collections. All other necessary sockets are present on the Philips in sufficient quantities.

You can find a complete list of the Philips 56 PFL 9954 H's connections in the full specifications.

The side-mounted connection panel hosts, among others, an additional HDMI input and a mini-jack headphone socket.

TV Tuners:

The Philips is fitted with a three-way tuner, and receives both analog and digital cable (DVB-C) and terrestrial digital (DVB-T) TV. Both digital tuners are HDTV-capable. Unfortunately, we weren't able to test the HD reception, since no free-to-air HDTV channels are broadcast in the location of our test laboratory. The CI slot supports the new encryption standard CI Plus, so the Philips is on the safe side should digital cable begin using CI Plus.

Teletext:
The Philips has a modern Teletext 2.5 decoder, which stands out from the conventional Teletext system with finer graphics and a palette of 16 instead of eight colors. These improvements allow more attractive pages, but only a handful of European TV channels actually provide this so-called "HiText" standard.

The extra-wide picture format comes in handy when the TV is displaying Teletext: You can view the text and the TV picture alongside one another in a sensible size, and with almost no deformation. 

Photo, Video, and MP3 Playback:

Photos, videos, and music can play back in various ways on the 56 PFL 9954 H. It plays files back from a USB stick, for example, or can access data on a PC's hard disk - more about this in the Network functions section.

Photo playback disappoints a little. The Philips displays images of up to 1,920 x 1,080 pixels with side bars, and the exact 1:1 pixel-mapping results in extremely high detail. Larger pictures also scale down attractively. But the Philips never uses the full width of its screen. Even photos produced specifically to match the screen's native resolution (2,560 x 1,080 pixels) display slightly reduced in size (and therefore with scaling).

The lack of a zoom function makes it impossible to fill the screen with a photo. This is a real shame - the attractive wall-lighting system and huge screen surface would have turned the Philips into an excellent digital photo frame.

The quality of video-file playback is, in itself, excellent. But during testing, the Philips only showed a few file formats - contrary to information in the user manual - in optimal quality, namely DivX, DivX-HD, MPEG 2 (DVD), and MPEG 2 (TS-files). One plus point, however, is that you don't have to tell the TV in advance whether you want to play back photos, videos, or music; rather, the TV recognizes the type of file automatically.

Network Functions:

The Philips offers various options for inputting multimedia files via streaming. The first version uses a wireless connection: The TV has a WLAN/WiFi receiver. To use this, you'll need a streaming server and a WLAN network.

The data provider (the server) could be software (such as Windows Media Connect) running on a PC, or hardware with similar functionality (multimedia hard disks, router). Alternatively, you can also input the files via a network cable.

The second function of the network input is even more interesting: Here, the Philips out-trumps comparable models from Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic. Besides YouTube videos, the TV can display many other informative online services.

For understandable reasons, the content of these websites is partially filtered - you cannot therefore access inappropriate material on the Philips.

The following lists give the currently available services - these offers relate to TVs operating in the UK.

Videos:

• YouTube:
  Well-known, online video portal. Videos display either in a window or enlarged.

Music:

• Tunin.fm:
  Web-radio portal with a great selection in 24 genres. Decent sound quality.

Weather:

• MeteoGroup:
  Animated weather maps and commentaries for the Netherlands, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Spain, and Belgium, with rainfall radar and satellite imagery.

Miscellaneous:

• Funspot:
  Simple, but attractively presented games - including, for example, Sudoku, Blackjack, and Memory.

• Netlog:
  You can only use this social-networking service - for blogs, chat, sharing photos, etc. - if you first create a member account using a PC.

• myalbum.com:
  Free, online photo-sharing service. Peruse friends' and relatives' latest holiday snaps, wedding photos, etc.

Navigation within the multimedia menu is clear, but it could react a touch faster.

PC Monitor Usage:

Actually, the Philips isn't a bad PC monitor: The picture is bright and glare-free, and can carry static images for hours on end without suffering burn-in and the associated ghost images.

The Philips displays a cleanly scaled PC picture via both the analog VGA and digital HDMI inputs. This works best at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels and a frame rate of 60 Hertz. Via HDMI, the picture displays perfectly - it's crisp, shows the finest color-details accurately, and doesn't blur during motion. Even via VGA, the picture is accurate, although the sharpness is a little poorer. Still, most TVs simply drop sails on sight of full HD resolution and display no picture at all.

If you were hoping to be able to use the display's 2,560 x 1,080 pixels for an ultra-wide PC picture, we're afraid we have some bad news. Every time we tried the resolution on our test PC, the Philips displayed a distorted picture.

For the VGA input, we would have liked to see manual fine-tuning of clock and phase - all TVs we know of that have a VGA input provide these controls. What's more, the Philips doesn't indicate the resolution and refresh rate.

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