Philips 42PF9631D

Reviewed by: rickyriver

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Best HD and SD picture quality. Ambilight is great. Plenty of connectivities and features. Great looking case.

Weaknesses: No SD slot. USB slot does not work with my memory card reader. Remote not programmable.

Overall Evaluation: I took many trips to CircuitCity and Bestbuy trying to find the TV with the best picture quality. I chose plasma over LCD simply because of its lower price and better black level. 42in plasma has the best value for the money. A year ago it cost almost 3 thousand dollars, now it only costs half. -- As far as my eyes can tell, Samsung, Panasonic and Philips have the best picture quality. (Pioneer was excluded because it is much more expensive than the others) I don't like Panasonic's silver case. I like Philips' wide black bezel, and plus it has ambilight and QAM tuner that Samsung does not have. It was also cheaper than Samsung. So I chose Philips. -- I am very happy with the picture quality. The HD picture is awesome. Even the SD picture is very good. It looks a little blurry, but within one second I can notice the picture get sharpen up. I am not sure if it is because the signal is not stable yet in the first second, or the TV processes the picture to make it sharp. I don't have many chances to see SD picture in the stores, but I remember it did not look as good as I get from my Philips. Many times, I was wondering am I watching the HD? -- The ambilight is a great feature. It eases my eyes. I don't get distracted by it when it is on. But when I turn it off, the TV looks boring and my eyes don't feel as relaxed. But you can see the ambilight only at night and when you turn off all the bright lights in your house. If you always have lights on when watching TV, the ambilight will make no difference to you. -- Another feature I really like is it automatically re-size the picture to fill up the screen. -- PIP can be split screen or picture in picture. You can use PIP for a digital source and a analog source only. People do complain the sharp yellow edge may cause burn in. I don't care because I won't be using PIP too often or for too long. -- I can't comment on the sound because I use my receiver and surround sound system. -- Switching channels and sources is smooth and quick. Power up the TV takes a few seconds, but it is definitely not too long. -- Burn-in should not be an issue. All the TV logos are now on and off, and they are all semi-transparent which means its color is changing with the picture. -- There are some things I don't like about the TV, but they are not show stopper, so they don't bother me much: -- It only has a RF input for Antenna or Cable, but not both. Since the TV has a built-in QAM tuner which can pick up all the unscrambled cable channels, why don't they have one more RF input for me to take advantages of that. I can pick up over 200 digital channels from my cable, but all of the HD channels are encrypted. My HD antenna can pick up more than 10 digital channels and 5 of them have HD. With one RF input, I cannot get them all. So I have to use the RF input for the antenna, because I have to get the HD which is the whole point I buy an HDTV. I route my cable to VCR and to TV via composite. I can still pick up the 90 analog channels. It is not too bad. I don't watch those channels much anyway, except for the ESPN. But the QAM tuner is wasted. The only inconvenience here is I have to use the TV remote to switch antenna channels and use the VCR remote to switch the cable channels. I like the TV remote a lot. I wish I can control everything through it. The remote can control other Philips products like VCR or DVD player, but it does not look like it can be programmed to control products from other manufactures, at least the manual has no instructions for doing so. -- The USB slot does not work for me so far. I don't have a flash drive, but I have a 6 in 1 memory card reader. I plug in my SD card or CF card in the reader and plug the reader to the TV. The TV can detect the memory card, and sometimes can detect the pictures on the card, and once I was able to select and see one picture, but then the memory card disappears from the screen. I was bumped out to the main menu or the TV channel it is playing. After a while, it detects the memory card again and then the same things happen. I had no luck using my memory card reader to upgrade firmware as well. The TV just cannot detect the upgrade file in my SD card. It also does not recognize my Canon SD630 camera which is one of the most popular camera on the market. So I am not sure what devices it actually supports.-- I also wish it has optical audio input and output. It only has one RCA digital audio input and output. It is enough for now, and in the future I will be buying stuffs with HDMI, so I am fine with it. My receiver only have RCA audio input for CD and DVD. So I have to route my TV audio to the CD input on my receiver. When we watch TV from the antenna, I need to choose CD on my receiver to get the surround sound, which is very confusing to my wife.