Feb 06, 2009 by drew
A TV that's easy to set up.

There’s an old phrase that goes “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.”

Well, you can apply that to this TV because when you first set it up, it gives you a series of pictures and sounds, and by choosing which ones you like, it automatically determines the type of picture and sound quality that you like, and saves your personal settings accordingly. After that, it’s all smooth sailing with this TV. The big story is the Perfect Natural Motion engine, which smoothes out the motion in your video so that everything moves in a surreal manner. It takes a while to get used to, but it makes even regular TV look nice. The sound is also quite heavy too, with good bass despite the invisible speakers.

FEATURES
01 Full HD resolution
The 9703 will display video up to 1080p Full HD resolution, so it will play your Blu-ray and HD videogames at their maximum video quality.

02 Perfect Natural Motion
By intelligently inserting more frames of animation between existing frames from the source material, this motion engine makes motion so smooth it’s pretty surreal.

03 Full connectivity
Four HDMI ports is quite generous, but it also has all your standard options and even a USB port for you to play your MP3 and MPEG files. The ports are also well arranged behind for greater convenience.

04 Invisible 30W speakers
Although you can’t see them from the front (they’re hidden behind the TV), you will definitely be able to hear the sound from these two speakers. For regular TV speakers, they pack quite the punch, and come with easy settings that you can tweak to your liking.

QUICK SPECS
Display type: LCD
Size: 42-inch
Video Engine: Perfect Pixel HD
Contrast ratio: 30,000:1
HDMI ports: 4

Verdict
A pretty good all-rounder TV.

Price: SGD4,799
Website: www.philips.com.sg

DID YOU KNOW?
To test a TV with a touted motion engine, one of the movies used to review the TV was The Rock. This is one of the few movies where Nicolas Cage is not seen with a ridiculous hair piece.

This review was first published in Gadget3 Magazine November 2008