Philips 4000 Series: 42PFL4606

After looking at some of Philips' more advanced TVs in recent weeks, today we're reviewing one of the firm's more basic options.  We're taking a good look at the 4000 Series, as represented by the Philips 42PFL4606H, which has CCFL backlighting, Full HD and a 100 Hz motion interpolation filter but no 3D.

Build Quality and Design

Unsurprisingly, the feature list is pretty short, but it should be more than enough for any users who don't want either 3D or online services.

The PFL4606H isn't the slimmest TV we've ever seen, and the fluorescent tubes used by its CCFL backlighting mean it measures 8.3 cm from front to back, although it hardly looks out of place if you wall mount it.

The media player isn't anything to write home about either, as the software chosen by Philips makes do with the bare minimum.  It can decode XviD files, but not DivX.  With HD content, it can handle AVC-HD, X.264 and WMV, but struggles with container formats, only accepting MP4, MOV, MTS and M2TS with AVI and MKV unrecognised.  We can't really recommend it is a media centre.

Finally, the onscreen menus might look flashy and modern but they're not very easy to use.  Sony's XrossMediaBar interface, borrowed from the PlayStation 3, is still unbeaten in this field.  The Philips system doesn't even have looping scrolling: when you get to the bottom of a list, you can't return to the top with a single press and instead need to scroll all the way back up.  This is something we've been complaining about for years and there's still no sign of any progress.

Ghosting and Input Lag

Responsiveness
Light Background	Dark Background	Average

The 4000 Series didn't get off to a good start, with an above average ghosting time compared to the other TVs we've tested recently at 19.5 ms.  That makes it twice as slow as the best TVs.  It's especially unsuited for gamers given the incredible input lag of 133 ms, a result the likes of which we've never seen before!

Image Quality

With the default settings, the picture on this TV is too saturated, and the only test it managed to pass was colour temperature.  Fortunately, you can improve things a little by switching to 'Photo' mode and making a few other tweaks: set contrast to 45, edge enhancement to 0 and turn off all of the following filters: dynamic contrast, optimal picture and colour enhancement.  Once you've done all of that, the PFL4606 doesn't do too badly.


With that configuration, the average deltaE falls from 12.2 to 3.2, which represents a real improvement.  This particular score measures the difference between the colours requested by the original video source-your games console or Blu-ray player for instance-and those actually shown onscreen.  When it falls below 3.0, we say that a display can reproduce colours accurately because any remaining discrepancies are invisible to the naked eye.



Unfortunately for Philips, the IPS display it has chosen has a rather weak contrast ratio which never gets above 1000:1.  Compare that to the 4000:1 achieved by its PVA competitors ...  Unless you want to see blacks that look like washed-out greys, we suggest you turn the lights down before you watch this TV.

It's a common problem on IPS displays, which have another edge over PVA and MVA devices in that they offer much wider viewing angles than the rival technology.  Philips did pretty well in that area, with a score of 2.9/5.

A motion interpolation filter, called 'HD Natural Motion' by Philips, eliminates jerkiness and flicker, but don't take it too far.  If you turn it up beyond the minimum setting, the picture quality is affected by visual artefacts as well as the general impression that you're watching a home movie shot on a camcorder.  In general, HD content looks as perfect as you'd expect.  But even with the sharpness set to 0, the picture can be a little too sharp.  Presumably the PFL4606 has a high level of detail even when this turned down to a minimum.  The same can't be said of SD content, of course, where the upscaling leaves things a little blurry and there's no need to up the sharpness.

Clouding

You might have expected this TV to be exempt from clouding given its poor contrast ratio.  But during our tests, we saw three small patches of light leaking out onto the display of the unit we were testing: one in each of the bottom corners and another at the top.

Audio Quality

Green area: good. Orange area: satisfactory. White area: unacceptable.
Voices should sound clear (in the range 300 Hz-3.5 kHz), but there is no sign of bass.

We suspect that Philips has deliberately capped the volume on this TV because it knew the speakers aren't up to much.  That means the sound is seriously lacking in power, maxing out at 84 dB with no sign of bass whatsoever.  The rest of the spectrum is more acceptable, but with so many problems, it's hard for us to award more than three stars in this section.

Energy Consumption

The PFL8606H ends on a positive note: it only needs 100 W while switched on, and is even less greedy on standby, requiring less than 1 W.