Digital Trends

LCD TV’s have always been hit and miss in regard to picture quality. You have black levels, ghosting, brightness, contrast, and color issues to deal with on most TV’s, but they always seem to be on the extreme end when it comes to fine tuning the picture on an LCD. The Philips 42PF9831D certainly seems to make this easier. Philips Clear LCD definitely helps with creating bright, colorful, and vibrant images. Although, depending on what you are watching, it might feel a little over exaggerated. The preset movie modes work, but even then we found ourselves calibrating each of the modes to our liking; thankfully the built-in memory remembers your settings. As with most LCD TV’s make sure that you give yourself plenty of viewing distance when viewing the screen. If you are too close, you will notice a grainier picture. We found that from about 7 feet on, the picture looked the best. LCD’s have always had an arguably more vibrant picture than their plasma counterparts, and that works for and against them. Some content looks terrible when it’s sharpened too much or if it’s poorly recorded, and unfortunately an LCD will expose that flaw.

 

One incredibly nagging issue we encountered was the auto picture size setting. This setting is supposed to resize the screen depending on what you are watching. A DVD movie shot in 16:9 for example would resize to the appropriate size automatically. But when you are watching HD content broadcast over the air, a commercial might be shot in 4:3 while another is in 16:9. In this case, the auto setting went back and forth. It was cool at first and then became a huge annoyance. It would be great if the TV said “Ok this is an HD channel,” and just kept everything in 16:9 mode, forcing you to manually change the setting here if you need to.

 

The media card slots and USB inputs are great for showing your media directly through the set without using a PC. For media types, this LCD supports MP3’s, JPEG, and .alb slideshow files. You can also connect a digital camera directly to the Philips 42PF9831D using the USB ports.

 

The included remote control has a very modern look to it that we like. However, the piano black finish is a little too extreme and will smudge easily. The buttons are backlit and respond from a decent range.

 

 
Philips 42PF9831D Remote Control

 

Of course we saved the best feature for last, the Ambilight 4 technology. Like we mentioned in the introduction, this has been very hit or miss with the professional world. A lot of reviewers think the whole “Ambilight thing” is nothing more than a gimmick. Does it really reduce eye-strain and make the viewing experience that much better? Well, it didn’t do much to relieve our poor eyes but it undoubtedly looks very, very cool. Everyone who came in to view this LCD loved the full-surround ambilight feature and believed it to add to the overall viewing experience. With Ambilight 4, you not only have light coming from all four sides, but one side could be a completely different color than the other depending on the content being played. If you find that Ambilight is bothering you, simply turn it off, but if you don’t want the Ambilight at all, we suggest buying a different set altogether.