[Graham]

Hi.

I'm wondering if anyone knows much about the philips 37PF9731 TV.
37", 1920x1080 (1080i only though?), 6000:1 contrast, 3ms response, ambilight, divx over the network, ....

They were released about november/december last year over here, and I recently managed to find one. Simply put I thought it looked utterly amazing.


However I've read they used to have very serious problems with the scanning backlight dying (about 8 weeks in?). Is this problem still prevalent?

Otherwise I was seriously impressed. The special backlight certainly worked as advertised, as I couldn't see a hint of motion blur, and the black level was amazing. (TV was running a 720p demo reel, with fast moving scenes too)
The only thing I noticed was that very dark objects became solid black too quickly, but I suspect this was a contrast setting on the demo TV.


Basically I can get one of these for a bit less than the price of a 40" 720p samsung/sony v series...
very tempted...

[AlphaWolf]

I'd ask/search over at http://www.avsforum.com/

I believe they even have an active philips rep posting.

[Hector]

I hace the 32" version of this TV, and i must say it's freaking awesome. If i remember correctly there was a couple of issues with the 37 and 42" but maybe they were addressed in later firmwares.

The picture quality it's amazing. The SD content looks superb, and so it does the HD (720p feed from my HTPC). The contrast is high, and blacks are nice too. The colour reproduction is very good. Not too much saturation nor washed out colores. It seems to do 1:1 pixel mapping when setting resolution to 1280x720. I don't recommend using 1080i. There's a little bit of flickering.

Sometimes there's a little of banding here and there, but I think it's due to the automatic contrast adjustement. It can be changed.

[Graham]

Just a follow up. I actually managed to find a few of these tv's.
One, which was brand new, looked utterly fantastic. Really stunning.

The other, had the dreaded scanning backlight problem, where the backlight 'slows down' due to copper buildup in the backlight tubes. It looked dull and dark, the dynamic contrast completely screws up, and full white screen showed very clear horizontal 'waves' as the backlight scanned down the image. In short, it was horrible.

This has turned me off them completely. There is newer firmware, which allows adjustments to be made to help correct the problem (bumping up the voltage to the backlight helps vaporize the copper deposits), however from what I can tell, if you do this - and this is what they do when they service the TV - you have a 50/50 chance the backlight will die. Simply, the TV has a critical design flaw that still hasn't been fixed, and hence it's been discontinued, and philips have killed off the scanning backlight tech (they are moving to led backlights iirc).

This is what it eventually ends up looking like: