12 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
A great TV for the price
Date of Review: Jul 18, 2006
The Bottom Line: Excellent picture quality, ample High Def. inputs, sleek design and good sound make this an easy recommend.
The first thing that appealed to me about this set was the LCD technology. I live in the mountains, and although it seems they may have fixed the high altitude issues experienced with Plasma, I did not want to make a several thousand dollar wager. There are many places where you can get this set for a bit less than I paid so it is a bargain too.
Set up was very easy. Since I have an HD cable box with a DVR and On Demand, I can not use the cable card. The cable card will work for digital cable, but not on demand, so I chose not to use it, as I like the functionality of On Demand programming.
It took me about twenty minutes to lay out the mounting position on the wall and secure the bracket to the studs. It took about another fifteen minutes to hook up the HDMI cable and program the TV for the channels I received. I liked that it did a good job of rejecting the channels that were not in my cable package, without me having to do that manually.
An awesome feature of this set is the USB port. You can go to Phillips' website and download new firmware. Upgrading the TV is as easy as saving the file to your rood drive in your USB flash memory device plugging it in the TV then turning on the set. I think this is a great feature as it lets Phillips upgrade items on the set based on customer feedback. There have been three available upgrades since I purchased the set earlier this year.
I have the television set about 48" off the ground across from a very large (90" x 39") window (about 8' away). I have the brightness and contrast settings in the middle of their range. Except for some slight loss of picture in the brightest hours of the day, noon to like two with a South facing window the picture is consistently clear and bright. I should note that I generally do not have the shade drawn on my front window so this observation is with the window open.
I did not like that the provided remote was not programmable. Since you are likely to pick up an HDMI DVD player that is not Phillips, this is silly. Luckily my cable remote is programmable. The two HDMI inputs are a great selling point to this unit. I have one for the DVD and one for HD Cable and I can still hook up my X-box with the RGB. If you are not using the provided remote you can switch between inputs (and there are a lot of them) by using channel down (anything below channel one begins to toggle between the available inputs.
The picture clarity is superb; you can tell that Phillips has had some time to perfect this technology. I should also note that the set does a fair job of taking an analog signal (regular cable) and up converting it, though upon occasion I can notice slight blurring in fast moving scenes if the original program is not of high quality.
Overall this TV is a good price, has room to grow, with 2 HDMI and RGB connections. It is a shame the remote is not programmable, but the picture quality along with the upgradeability of its firmware more than make up for that annoyance.
