Philips 42PF9996 review

If you find Ambilight appealing, Philips also offers a 42-inch plasma and a 32-inch LCD with that feature.

Overall, the 42PF9996 is a surprisingly good performer in many ways. As far as LCD flat panels go, it produced one of the best pictures we've seen to date in the category. But, unfortunately, Ambilight doesn't help much. While it does have a Soft White setting that's supposed to approach the broadcast standard of 6,500 Kelvins, it was clearly too orange. Any other setting, whether it be blue, red, or whatever, will negatively affect your perception of the colors on the screen. To get it right, you'd have to put D6500 filters in the lamp housings, which would definitely make this feature useful in reducing eyestrain and fatigue while still maintaining accurate color perception (although one could put a lamp with a D6500 bulb behind any TV and get the same benefit). By the way, we recommend you don't use the Active Control Plus with Light Sensor feature, as it basically changes the black and white level of the picture depending on light fluctuations in the room.

The panel calibrated fairly well, although grayscale tracking was not as good as we would have liked. Unfortunately, that's the norm these days with flat-panel LCD TVs.

Most surprisingly, black-level performance was better than on any flat-panel LCD set we've seen yet. Sure, it's still not as good as a tube-based display or as the best plasmas, such as Panasonic's TH-42PD25U/P. But for an LCD, the color of black was quite deep. Color decoding was also exceptional, with no red push whatsoever.

Unfortunately, the 42PF9996 has two major performance-related feature deficits. Like all Philips HDTVs we've seen, it lacks the all-important 2:3 pull-down detection in the video processor, so your standard-def sources such as cable TV, satellite, and VHS will exhibit significant motion artifacts with film-based material. A progressive-scan DVD player is a must with this TV. The set also lacks independent memory per input, which means you can optimize the picture for only one video source.

After calibration, we checked out fast-motion scenes from Seabiscuit to test the panel's response time. We saw no visible streaking or blurring, so we're satisfied most viewers won't either. Colors looked awesome, and detail was excellent. For black-level performance evaluation we used Alien, and we were pleasantly surprised at how well the 42PF9996 rendered very dark material. During the opening sequence, there was good detail in the bottom of the ship and the cockpit, and we saw very little low-level noise.

HD from DirecTV looked quite good, and the panel's high resolution really let details come out. Happily, black level and color were close to where they should be with the settings we used for the DVD input. However, that doesn't mean that would necessarily be the case for other sources, and we'd still prefer to be able to tweak the sources individually.