Philips Essence 42PES0001H

Archive: 40'' to 49'' TVs - late 2008, early 2009 >


Screen size	42 inches (106 cm)
Resolution	1920 x 1080 pixels
HD compatibility (1080i/720p)	Oui
HD Ready certification	Oui
Brightness	500 cd/m²
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Contrast ratio	66 000 : 1
Viewing angles (H+V)	176° / 176°
Response time	2
Sound level	2 x 15 Watt RMS + Subwoofer
Connectivity	VGA • HDMI (x3) • Péritel (x2) YUV • Composite
Dimensions (LxHxW)	982 x 685 x 250 mm
Weight	20.00 Kg
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Vincent Lheur
Test date: January 21, 2009

Our scores in the blink of an eye

Black levels:	0.16 cd/m²
ANSI contrast:	1127:1
White levels (Max):	188 cd/m²
Gamma (Av):	2,15
DeltaE on PC:	4,5

We take these measuements using the best settings for watching a movie. Whether Cinema, Home Theater or Film mode, the majority of TVs have a preset for this. Wherever possible, we set the white levels at 150 cd/ cd/m², although, obviously, we measure the maximum brightness of white separately.

Philips is now marketing a new series of televisions: the Essence. The first model we’ve come across, the Essence 42PES0001H, has an extra box designed to handle all connections. The panel is thin, lighter and more discrete.

An additional connections box

Even though you can leave it on its base, which doesn’t pivot, the 42PES001 has been designed to be fixed to the wall. The wall fitting moreover comes with it and uses a new very practical system that means you can adjust any mistakes you make in terms of alignment when drilling the holes. This facilitates installation and set-up.
Once it has been installed the screen links up to a central box with a cord. The cord is a little over 2.20 metres, giving plenty of scope for placing the screen. It will easily go beside or on the player (DVD, Blu-ray…) in your living room. And as Philips has designed this product well, the central box provides power for the screen. No need then to supply power to both parts of the TV… in contrast to the first generations of this design that needed a separate cable for each part of the screen. So you only have to hide one cable rather than two. And if you don’t hide it, one cable will obviously be more discrete than a whole load of wires coming out the bottom of your screen. The hi-fi, power supply, arial or dvd player are all connected directly to the box designed for the purpose.

Note that the detachable speakers are fixed under the panel and point directly towards the viewer, in contrast to most other models (that point towards the back wall that then reflectsthe sound waves forward again). The overall finish is nice, with a very thin and discrete panel and a box covered in black anodized aluminium.
It has good conectivity, apart from the fact that there are only 3 HDMI sockets. For the rest, there’s a coaxial digital audio out, a USB socket and an ethernet socket. The remote no longer has the rotating scroll of previous models and has more modern and minimalist design. It is extremely small and covered in aluminium.

Back panel of the separate box

Side panel of the separate box

When you turn it on, unfortunately you find the traditional Philips menu. It isn’t our favourite, especially because of the fact that it is too invasive and covers the image too much when you’re changing the settings. What’s more, the presentation is starting to look quite out of date and really needs a facelift. The launch of this PES0001H was a good opportunity to put this into place. Also, unusually for a TV at this price, the backlighting can’t be set manually. Shame...

The first Philips with deep blacks

We now move to our ratings and our sensor and... surprise: the levels of black oscillate in Film mode between 0.14 and 0.16 cd/m² with the backlighting disactivated. You can go much lower if you activate it, but at the price of a loss in quality. This is already very good and also very rare on a Philips. This make doesn’t usually go much outside of between 0.20 and 0.30 cd/m².

As a result you get an ANSI contrast of around 1120:1. Another good score. Note that Philips seems to have deliberately limited the luminosity of the backlighting tubes so as to deepen the blacks, thus limiting maximum brightness; we only just got over 188 cd/m² while we usually managed between 250 and 300 cd/m². Distribution of brightness across the grey levels is also good, with a score of 2.15 across the whole curve and therefore very close to the target of 2.2. In terms of colour quality, the deltaE of 4.5 places it in the upper half of the market.

Now for the first DVD films: colour is natural and the contrast agreable, but something does spoil the image. It seems artificial. By playing with the settings, already however at their simplest after disactivation of dynamic filters, we noticed that the “Advanced Definition” filter enormously accentuates encoding faults. It has a particularly bad effet on actors’ faces. We therefore decided to cut it, even if that meant losing a bit of sharpness. You can still compensate a bit by increasing the sharpness setting.

In HD you gt the same results as in SD, but with a slightly less destructive “Advanced Definition” setting. By disactivating it you get an image that is a bit blurry and not as sharp as what you get on TVs from other manufacturers. After the problems you get in SD, you wonder whether you should leave it on, off or whether you should constantly modify the setting.

Another filter that those who can’t stand jerkiness will appreciate: the HDNM (HD Natural Motion) fluidifies movement considerably. It is however less effective than Sony’s Motionflow or Samsung’s Movie Plus as there is a certain amount of noise around objects in movement from the lowest settings. What’s more, even when activated and with the 100 Hz mode, you do notice some ghosting on text moving across the screen.

The angle of vision is not great, not much more than 90° in fact, both vertically and horizontally. Anything beyond that and though the colours remain good, too much light escapes through the LCD panel and washes out the image by brightening dark parts of the image. The image you get from a PC connected by the HDMI is perfect (no frame or scale faults).

At last, speakers that point towards the viewer

The positioning of the speakers immediately gives improvement in the medium and high pitched sounds. The sound is much better than on TVs with speakers at the back, without however being a real home cinema system.

Conclusion

Here Philips has given us a TV with some nice features but which loses out on details such as too obvious ghosting, or destructive filters. It does touch on 5 stars but without quite getting there. Note also that it costs three times as much as the least expensive 42 inch screens currently on the market; a lot of money!