Handling

The 220TW9FB is Philips' contribution to the world of hybrid screens, good as both TVs and computer monitors.  


Billed as a piece of hardware that 'boosts your productivity and brings you ultimate enjoyment', it'll have to work hard to beat Samsung's T220HD, or its updated version the T220MD.

With a glossy screen, plenty of video inputs, a remote control and a built-in TV tuner and speakers featuring on all three models, there's little to separate them in terms of hardware.

Under the default configuration, we measured an average DeltaE of 6.0, meaning that, straight out of the box, the colors aren't all faithful.  This measurement describes the discrepancy between the colours in the signal sent by the graphics card and those actually shown on screen.  As a general rule, the lower the score, the better, but the human eye can rarely tell the difference if DeltaE is below 3.

Adopting the 'Warm' colour profile, and turning brightness down to 27, we did manage to get a DeltaE of 3.8, with contrast of just 600:1.  With this rather unusual configuration, then, the 220TW9FB avoids the worst and scrapes in at three stars.

A response time of 5 ms and an input lag of up to two frames mean that gamers will most likely want to look elsewhere.  This is certainly a point where the T220MD does better, with just a single frame of ghosting.


Disappointing TV Performance

We didn't see much improvement using the 220TW9FB as a TV.  The very strong blacks mean that you lose virtually all detail in dark areas of the screen.  The picture also suffers from a lot of distortion.

All TVs have a noise-reduction chip, but the one Philips has included is absolutely incapable of handling the problem.  Turning the noise reduction off in the menu has absolutely no visible effect.  It's so bad that we were left wondering if the option was included just to beef up the list of options.

We also noticed a lack of sharpness with some High Definition signals that was even worse with Standard Definition TV.  It's probably best to use this as an occasional TV, rather than as a replacement for your current television.