Turning our attention now to the guts of the 47PFL9632D, we find its pictures driven by a really powerful trio of innovations.
For starters, the screen eschews LCD’s familiar single backlight in favour of Clear LCD technology, whereby an array of controllable Hot Cathode Fluorescent Lights can be manipulated so as to reproduce a scanning effect like that seen on old CRT TVs. Why ape such a dated technology? Because for all CRT’s bulkiness and ‘analogueness’, its scanning electron beam helped it produce motion with a sharpness and smoothness that the vast majority of flat TVs can only dream about.
It should also be said that being able to control the luminance of different parts of the screen individually opens up the prospects for some far deeper black levels than you could expect with a single, static backlight.
The next big ace up the 47PFL9632D’s sleeve is its 14-bit colour processor, which should have the power to deliver a much wider, subtler colour palette than anything seen on previous Philips LCD generations.
For my money, though, the single most critical aspect of the 47PFL9632D’s picture engine is something Philips likes to call Perfect Pixel Engine HD. This is actually an umbrella term for a swathe of different picture processes headed up by 100Hz. With LCD TVs, 100Hz is used to double the normal PAL scanning rate of the picture to try and make moving objects appear with more clarity than is normally possible with LCD technology.
Also key to the Perfect Pixel Engine is a massively revamped version of Philips’ old Digital Natural Motion system. Now dubbed HD Natural Motion, it’s had its power souped up to handle the extra data present in HD sources and do a more intelligent job of interpolating the extra frames of image data it uses to make movement across the screen look smoother.
HD Natural Motion also incorporates a new 48Hz scanning element that it applies to pure 1080p/24 HD sources of the sort increasingly available from Blu-ray and HD DVD players. By simply doubling the 24fps frame rate, the 48Hz mode should be able to reproduce 1080p/24fps sources with slightly less noise, greater clarity and enhanced fluidity.
All the building blocks of Philips’ old Pixel Plus technology are also subsumed within the Perfect Pixel Engine, including the addition of extra fine detail to standard definition sources, plus sophisticated noise reduction routines designed to tackle both inherent source noise and noise potentially created as a side effect of all the heavy image processing going on.
Tucked within the 47PFL9632D’s seemingly endless onscreen menus are countless user options, including the facility to adjust the ‘heaviness’ with which some of the above features go about their business, and plenty more features that we really can’t go into here without boring you senseless. All you need to know is that the only TV we can think of that can boast more features than the 47PFL9632D is Philips’ own Aurea TV.
And so to the moment of truth: does the 47in screen emphasise the greatness of Philips’ processing engine, or does it reveal some unexpected flaws?
Fed with the strikingly good HD DVD transfer of Blade Runner, it doesn’t take long to choose the ‘greatness’ option. For starters, we’ve yet to see any flat TV of this sort of size deliver such a remarkably sharp and detailed picture. All the amazing detail that makes Ridley Scott’s vision of a city of the not too distant future so strikingly believable and beautiful is rendered with breath-taking accuracy, generating even more respect for the HD remastering of the film than we had before.
Colours are dazzlingly vibrant too, with the huge floating billboards that inch across the city sky exploding from the screen in a burst of retina-burning glory that perfectly captures their deliberate hyper-intensity versus the rather subdued palette of anything in the city that isn’t neon.
Crucially, though, the new 14-bit colour system ensures that the screen also does an immaculate job with all those subtler tones that play across faces and drab walls, even during Blade Runner’s many tricky dark sequences.
Next to impress is the TV’s handling of motion. As Deckard chases the first Replicant down a crowded street, the processing makes every element of the image, from the camera pans to the reams of motion within the frame, pass by without a trace of judder or lost resolution. Admittedly there’s the occasional gentle shimmering ‘halo’ around the edges of some of the people, but for me this artefact is a small price to pay for the pleasure of not seeing the kind of motion blur you find on practically every other large LCD TV. In any case, you can minimise the halo effect by making sure you keep the screen’s various processing elements set to a pretty low intensity.
Last but certainly not least among the 47PFL9632D’s talents is its black level response. Thanks to the ClearLCD backlight system and what’s clearly a very adept dynamic contrast processor that dims the backlight in response to how dark the image content is, the night sky against which Deckard plays out his final confrontation with Roy Batty looks remarkably dark and unflattened by the usual flat TV greyness.
