Philips 65PFL9708 review

The Philips 65PFL9708 will let you watch Ultra HD content on its massive 65in screen, though at present you’re more likely to be upscaling Full HD content to the Ultra HD resolution of 3,840×2,160. Although Ultra HD TVs are becoming more common, they’re still very expensive, so one of the most attractive features of the 9708 is its price. At £4,499 the 65PFL9708 is much cheaper than Ultra HD TV sets from rival manufacturers such as Sony, Samsung and LG.

The 9708 certainly has a good selection of connection ports, with no less than five HDMI ports. The fifth port feeds directly into a dedicated processing board designed to handle Ultra HD content. Unfortunately, it doesn’t conform to the new HDMI 2.0 standard, so users won’t be able to Ultra HD content at 60 frames per second until Philips releases a promised external upgrade kit. The 9708 also has component and SCART video inputs, an optical digital audio output, three USB ports, a Common Interface slot and an Ethernet port.

The 9708 makes good use of Philips’ AmbiLight system, which uses an array of colour LEDs on the back of the TV to project colours on the surface behind the television. The Ambilight LEDs change colour to reflect the colours on screen so that the pictures you’re viewing appear to bleed out of the top and sides of the frame. We’re fans of the effect because it provides a greater sense of immersion when watching films and sports.

Philips provided us with a video server for the purposes of our review, which contained ultra high-definition video footage. However, the footage was mostly made up of high-resolution time-lapse photography that had been spliced together to make a video rather than native Ultra HD motion video. The detailed vistas, brightly coloured skies and sharp textures certainly looked impressive, but to see how the 9708 coped with proper Ultra HD video we also watched Blender Foundation’s open-source Ultra HD video Tears of Steel.

The extra detail present in Ultra HD video is nothing short of breathtaking. Facial features, cloth textures and texture detail in things such as brickwork and metal look incredible, thanks in part to the 9708’s brilliantly sharp picture. The Ultra Resolution setting, added more perceived details, but the differences were small enough that most people won’t be able to spot them from an average viewing distance. Action sequences proved troublesome, and we did see some artefacts, such as when watching football. The artefacting doesn’t ruin the picture, but it is distracting.

Philips has used a VA panel for the 9708. VA panels may not be able to match IPS panels for viewing angles, but the 9708’s VA panel certainly helped create excellent contrast in darker scenes. The Colour Enhancement option made colours look a little too oversaturated, but the 9708 produced more natural-looking images when we switched Colour Enhancement off, changed colour temperature to neutral and slightly reduced the colour setting.

The 9708 can upscale Full HD footage to Ultra HD thanks to its Ultra Resolution feature, but this produced a slightly grainy image that only appeared a little sharper than it did with the Ultra Resolution feature switched off. Hair, facial features and clothing looked more natural when upscaled compared to viewing the same footage at Full HD resolution, but only up close. Differences were minimal from a distance, even on the 9708’s 65in screen.

Although Ultra Resolution can add a little extra detail to Blu-ray films, it simply can’t rescue standard definition broadcasts. Low bit-rate channels such as Dave and BBC News are pretty much unsalvageable, so we saw compression noise and a lack of detail when watching those channels.

Overall, the 9708’s Ultra HD 2D picture quality was above average but hardly groundbreaking. Excellent black levels are possible, even from the edge-lit backlight, and colour and contrast can produce fantastic looking images, but only if you take the time to tweak the presets. As is common with Philips TVs, the 9708 uses passive 3D technology. Passive 3D has zero flicker, almost no crosstalk and minimal reduction in brightness. It’s also much harder to spot the reduced vertical resolution when watching 3D content, which is a major bonus over existing 1080p passive 3D TVs.

The 9708 produces surprisingly clear and powerful audio. At higher volume levels, the 9708 impressed us with its dynamic range and the TV even produced a reasonable amount of bass.

Unfortunately, we were unimpressed with the speed of the onscreen interface. We often waited for the TV to respond to the remote control when we changed menus or used smart TV apps. The online services provided by the 9708 are fewer in number than we’d like. Philips has steadily grown the number of services and you can use BBC iPlayer, Netflix and YouTube to find entertainment, but there’s no LoveFilm, ITV Player, 4oD or Demand 5. Philips has integrated Facebook and Twitter in to the 9708 very well. The TV places a sidebar at the side of the currently playing channel so that you can post as you watch TV. The most welcome new feature is Cloud Explorer, which lets you stream multimedia content from your Dropbox web storage.

The online services provided by Philips’ TVs are getting better, but we still found the 9708’s smart TV interface to be sluggish and less user-friendly than Samsung’s Smart Hub or Sony’s SEN. Currently, the 9708 is one of the cheapest Ultra HD TVs you can buy in the UK. Even at 65in, the 9708 costs significantly less than the competition. However, lack of a HDMI 2.0 input and the delicate balance of settings required to get the best from it mean you’ll still make sacrifices for early adoption.