With every TV brand in the galaxy making deep, sustained booming noises about 3D at the moment, it’s a breath of fresh air to have Philips focus in on something else.
Yes, the flagship Philips 46PFL9706H is a 3D TV. Yes 3D looks spectacular and yes it’s going to be expensive – €2299 to be precise.
But the most impressive thing about this telly is the contrast. It’s absolutely fantastic. Philips claims the contrast ratio is 15,000,000:1 which would make it the blackest and also the brightest TV at the show. Whether that holds up in lab conditions remains to be seen, but to say the picture on this thing is striking would win the EISA award for biggest understatement at IFA 2011.
The immense contrast between the whites and the blacks owes a lot to Philips’ new Moth Eye anti-reflection filter which sits in front of the panel.
It’s essentially a transparent foil filter which sits in front of the panel and absorbs all incoming light instead of reflecting it back out again.
"The eye of a moth has evolved into an ingenious structure that eliminates almost all reflections," said Philips’ Robert Smitts at the Philips press conference this week. "It’s great for the moth, because it stays hidden from predators. It’s also great for viewers of our televisions, which now include the moth eye filter which delivers the deepest black and the highest image contrast ratio in the industry."
This filter was co-developed with Sharp who will also be using it on its TVs at some point. But for now it’s exclusively available on this one TV, which is disappointing frankly – they could have used it on more products but chose not to.
We were shown a behind-closed-doors demo of this TV next to last year’s Philips 46PFL9705 as well as leading Samsung and Sony Full LED tellies. There was simply no comparing the three. The 9706 simply blew them all away – 9705 included.
Other than the contrast, picture quality was superb across the board. Crosstalk was evident but less noticeable than last year’s models which is partly down to the new ’3D overdrive’ feature.
What this does is adapt the anti-crosstalk algorithm according to the temperature of the panel. The science behind this is that as the liquid crystals inside the panel get heated up by the LEDs, they become less viscous and more energised. The warmer the liquid crystals, the faster they can turn to change colour and thus form the pictures.
The trick is to get the liquid crystals as uniformly warm across the panel as possible, which makes the crosstalk corrections easier to calculate and thus the picture is better. It clearly works.
We were actually quoted a figure of 300% increased crosstalk correction which again we will have to test ourselves.
The other major feature of note is the two-player fullscreen gaming function. Like Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation TV, it allows to gamers to play with each other on the screen without seeing the other player’s image.
Philips’ new Active 3D (or 3D Max as it likes to call it) glasses actually have a dedicated button to toggle this mode so that you can make sure you’re seeing the right image.
It’s no surprise then that EISA has named this the best 3D TV at IFA 2011. We’ll be pestering Philips on a daily basis to get one of these in for a full test, so stay tuned for our full Philips 46PFL9706 review later in the year.
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