Philips 32" widescreen with PixelPlus

Ardent

Has anyone bought one of these? I'm thinking of getting one (the PixelPlus demo blew me away) and am curious as to how people got on with these TVs. I hear watching football can be a bit of a pain, ie., the ball streaks across the screen?

Thanks.

TCP/IP

mate has one and it is super the quality is great. footie is fine but dvd looks simply amazing go buy

Korg

They're .. ok.

The pixel plus demo on the set is a little bit misleading, the left-hand picture quality is somewhat worse than the lowest 'mode' you can set the tv to, being more blurred & jerky, tho maybe it's meant to simulate other tv sets, the worst ones

The pixel plus is interesting tho, it does deliver resonably sharp images, especially with text etc.

The natural motion is interesting if you appreciate smooth framerate on pc video games, it artificially provides the same effect, however it's not perfect, when it can't interpolate the intervening frames the 'framerate' suddenly drops, & is quite noticable. Also, if say the entire screen is panning left to right at a slow or medium pace, it's very smooth, however if say a smallish car appears in the frame driving the opposite direction, right to left, the edges of the car become very pixellated, it's _really_ annoying. Blinds on windows, or any regular pattern of parallel lines can get feked up when moving, especially if they're at an angle.

The thing that annoys me the most is the sharpening, i.e., if you have dark text on a light red background, the text will be surrounded by a halo of light red. The effect is used in other tv's etc to artificially sharpen the image but they go way over the top with the philips set. It looks really bad in red planet, val kilmer etc are surrounded by red halos if they're in the distance with the red martian sky behind them. You can turn down the sharpness to min but it's not enough. I read somewhere that switching off scan-velocity-modulation helps too, but not on my set.

The 'power regulation' on the set could be better, if you're watching in 4:3 mode the picture jumps around a bit as the image gets brighter/darker. If there's a bright sky and dark ground, the width of the picture is wider at the top than at the bottom.

I've not looked at many other sets for any length of time, so this may be a little biased. Otherwise it's a good tv, the pixel plus makes for clearer images & generally i like the natural motion, turning a blind eye to all it's imperfections!

I wish i noticed all this in the shop & not 2 weeks later

Ardent

Thanks for the replies.

I suppose it's a case of getting used to these TVs. I'll buy one - it's a good deal I'm getting - and if the PixelPlus turns out to be too bothersome, I'll just return it.

combs

Why bother with any of that Pixel Plus stuff or any other artificial improvements when you can just get a progressive scan TV for a more computer monitor type picture?

ZENER

I agree with combs on this, all processing of an analogue signal introduces distortion, this pixelplus thing sounds like a glorified sharpening circuit, they were poor when they were invented and from what I've seen they're no better now.

I'd goo for a TV with a proven pedigree and good quality Tube and electronics and the minimum of artificial additives !!

My 2c

ZEN