There’s much more to the Philips TV range than the attention-grabbing Ambilights whose frames emit pastel colours in keeping with the picture on the screen.

The Ambilight products polarise opinion: people either like ’em or not and, unfortunately, in-store demonstrations tend to do them no favours. If their warm glow is not your thing, look deeper in the range and you’ll find one of the best-looking Philips TVs ever, the K9’s rounded edges and glossy black acrylic finish just begging for attention.

Some manufacturers resort to all sorts of design tricks to add visual appeal to their sets when they’re just sitting there turned off being a piece of furniture. The K9, however, takes a minimalist approach, its plain surround accented by a thin, lighter coloured outer strip.

Where are the speakers? The K9 also uses Philips’s interesting ‘invisible’ system that takes the sound from the back and carries it around the frame via the strip that acts like a sound shell. This holds the promise of being truly horrible, but the engineers have pulled it off — one of the things that impressed us about the K9 was its excellent sound. It can generate deep bass, thanks to a pair of rear-firing woofers, with good control over the high end.

The picture’s no slouch, either. Tone’s reference Blu-ray discs were impressive in full 1080p after a bit of tweaking of the setup menu. The menu is a good and well-considered one, with pleasant and easily followed graphics. Included is a settings assistant that helps viewers quickly configure the kind of picture and sound they like best. It’s a little basic for all you Tone experts, but it’s a nice addition for those who don’t want to dine from the full menu.

The panel and its electronic management offered up natural colour and super detail, even in the darkest areas. Philips has loaded the set with some pretty decent technology to achieve this result. Its Perfect Colour system uses 17-bit processing that generates up to 2250 trillion colours, while the Perfect Contrast electronics package is in charge of contrast.

Smoothness is optimised by 100Hz technology with a 2ms response and upgraded Perfect Natural Motion technology that’s designed to eliminate motion judder on movies with its 500 million pixels per second processing power. The freedom from jaggies and halos in fast action sequences is outstanding.

The K9 is quite well future-proofed with one USB and four HDMI ports. A side panel holds one of the HDMI ports and connections for USB, S-Video, headphones and audio/video. A small but thoughtful feature on the back is poles for winding the power cable around with flexible ‘domes’ that help keep it in place.

The K9 is also available as a 47-incher for $1000 more and they’re part of a family of home entertainment products Philips is unleashing this year under the Design Collection name, including the more modestly specified K5 and K7 ranges.

Phil Hanson
Specifications
Phillips K9 42-inch LCD panel
$4999

Display: 
1920 x 1080p
Sound: Virtual Dolby digital and BBE
Multimedia: USB connection, MP3, Slideshow (.alb), JPEG, MPEG1 and MPEG2 playback
Connectivity: 3 x AV, 4 x HDMI, S-Video, audio in/out, video in, headphone stereo minijack
Dimensions: 
1054 x 658 x 100mm (W/H/D excl stand)
Weight: 28kg
Contact: 
www.philips.co.nz
PROS

    *     Impressive picture quality

    *     With sound to match

    *     Well styled

CONS

    *      Lacks built-in Freeview tuner

    *      A bit pricey

VERDICT

A worthy set to wear the K9 badge