Philips 40PFL9904

Philips' latest version of its Aurea TV range is the 40PFL9904H, which now uses LED backlighting.

If you're not familiar with it, Aurea is a special version of the manufacturer's Ambilight system, which uses diodes that illuminate the wall behind the screen to match the colours displayed on screen.  With Aurea, the same colours are also shown on the frame at the front of the TV.

Build Quality and Design

We don't rate this Ambilight Aurea system anywhere in our test procedure because it's entirely subjective--people either love it or hate it, but most people make up their mind one way or another.  We strongly recommend you see what it's like in practice before you decide to buy … or not.

All of the other equipment on the 40PFL9904H places it firmly at the top of Philips' range, and the manufacturer has clearly put its expertise to work in developing this TV, with five HDMI ports, a DLNA-compatible Ethernet port and a multimedia player.  The latter is not really worth talking about given the rather small number of formats it can decode--the main ones are MP3, JPEG and DivX.

For once, the remote control seems to have received as much attention as the rest of the TV.  This little sculpture is the result of a lot of hard design work.  Face down on the table, it looks like a smooth white pebble, and the buttons are only visible when you turn it over.  The last step is to slide the top surface up to reveal extra buttons for less common features.  Naturally enough, it's back-lit so you can use it in the dark.



Image Quality

With the default settings, the image isn't quite as neutral as it could be: the contrast is too strong, the colours are too bright, details are blurred out and there are problems with movements.  Switching to Film mode and adjusting a few settings (see inset) does a lot to improve things.  That's mainly because the Perfect Natural Motion feature is reduced to its minim setting, which reduces the amount of phantom images on the fastest moving scenes, without eradicating them entirely.

Despite the LED back-lighting, the average contrast ratio is just 1567:1, once again showing that LEDs aren't a magic bullet once the TV has been configured to display an acceptable image.

Ghosting is almost entirely invisible and the colours are perfect.  However, things get worse as soon as you move away from the screen's centre line.  Colours soon begin to look pale and blacks washed-out, while dark greys also appear dramatically lighter than they should.   To put it another way, the viewing angles are far too narrow.

Audio Quality

Once again, Philips has managed to stand out from the majority of other manufacturers thanks to the quality of its speakers.  The sound they produce is very respectable and miles away from the all-too-mediocre average we're used to on other TVs.  For real Home Cinema fans, though, the only solution is a real set of external speakers.

Energy Consumption

While on standby, the TV uses hardly any energy, varying between 0 and 0.1 W.  However, when you switch it on, the consumption rises to 138 W, which is a little bit above the average for an LCD TV thanks to the Ambilight Aurea system.  Because Aurea is one of this TV's main selling point, we decided to leave it switched on while measuring its power consumption, but with it deactivated, the 40PFL9904H would have managed four stars in this section.