zerolight

The nice folk at Robert Whyte did me a pretty good deal on a Sony 40V2000 LCD in exchange for my Philips 9986 which has been faulty (although not according to Philips, since day one). Initial impressions are very good. DVDs are far nicer on the Sony than they were on the Philips. The Sony would appear to have a better scaler, as well as class leading colour rendition. The result is a very natural looking picture. Not something you often see from an LCD displaying standard definition sources. NTL doesn’t fair quite so well, the bigger screen size highlighting the artefacts present in NTLs standard definition signal. Though it thus displays a little more noise than the Philips here, the NTL picture still benefits from the Sony?

Three and a half months. That’s how long it’s been since I notified Robert Whytes and Philips that there were issues with the PF9986 HD LCD TV. For almost half that time they had the TV in their workshop. Yet the fault still exists.

The fault, in case you’ve not been reading my blog, has to do with the way the TV displays a 1280×720p signal over component. It does a fine job over VGA, but over component it shifts the image off the side of the screen. Philips say that all you have to do is use the cursor on the TV remote to bring the image back onto the screen. Unfortunately, they don’t provide enough adjustment to do so, and you’re left with a 1cm wide strip of the picture missing on the right edge of the screen, this in addition to the unfortunate borders which you must live with if you buy an 9986.

The borders are one thing. I knew that when I bought the TV. But losing some of the image, even just that 1cm wide strip off the right side, is very poor on a ?