Philips 22PFL3404

The Philips PFL3404 is one of those small TVs destined for occasional use in limited spaces (office, kitchen etc.). It doesn’t have all the options that you find on high-end models but makes do with the essential.

Hardware, design and build

The panel resolution is 1366x768 and won’t fully display HD (1920x1080). Image degradation is noticeable with 1080p sources such as Blu-ray. You’ll note the effects of this upscaling in our face-offs:


On the other hand, display of SD images (Standard digital TV, DVDs and so on) is pretty good and better than what you generally get with Full HD 1080p TVs.

The PFL3404 is available in two versions:

• PFL3404D: with a standard digital TV tuner
• PFL3404H : with an HD digital TV tuner

Price comparison sites sometimes mix the two references. Take care to make sure you order the one you want.

Among the other restrictions with this small TV are the fact that it has just one HDMI socket but strangely there is a USB connector for playing MP3s and viewing photos.

We were nicely surprised to see the display delay with PC use is zero. This is pretty rare, exceptional even. Some computer screens manage this but it’s extremely rare on TVs. It’s a shame that the low resolution means the set isn’t well adapted to use with a PC.

Overall the menus are easy to navigate and understand. We do regret that you can’t progamme the different image and audio settings for each source. Though of course, this TV hasn’t really been designed to handle numerous sources.

Default image quality
This rating isn’t included in the overall rating

Nothing unusual here. As with a lot of TVs, the PFL3404 gives a poor default image: blacks not deep enough, false colours, colour temperature too high, brightness which varies too much according to the scene being shown. In other words, identical to the majority of models we’ve tested.

Cinema mode image quality

To get a more neutral image, you have to move to Film mode and lower the colours to 50. In our tests, we adjusted contrast to 69 to get a 200 cd/m² for brightness of whites; an allrounder score (dark or slightly lit rooms). We also disactivated all available filters (dynamic contrast, NR, etc.). We only left sharpness at 3 as this setting doesn’t cause any artefacts on the image.

Set like this, the PFL3404 gives a nice image but which is penalised by certain faults, starting with the blacks which don’t hold up. In fact, the darkest greys are too dark and you lose detail in the image. Black levels of 0,24 cd/m² are too bright and tend towards grey. This makes the contrast slightly weak.


The colours, although better than what we got with the default image, are not great. They are just about acceptable (DeltaE94 de 5,8).
Viewing angles are narrow and mean you have to sit right in front of the display. Degradation is particularly visible from above or below.
The lack of any system to improve the fluidity of the image at 50 Hz means ghosting is quite easily visible.

Image quality falls quite a long way below the best TVs but you have to say that it won’t generally be used under the same conditions. Remember the PFL3404 has been designed as a back-up TV for your kitchen or office or holiday house, rather than for intensive home cinema sessions.

Audio quality

Sketchy, aggressive and without any depth, the sound you get from the speakers isn’t very good at all. This is a fairly common fault with small TVs.

Energy consumption

Very economical on standby (0.1 W or perhaps 10 pence a year), the PFL3404 doesn’t use much electricity when on either: 36 W for our 22-inch test model. If you measure consumption on a scale taking screen size into account (270 W/m²), you can see that it’s somewhere in the middle of the range of current TVs.