Philips Widescreen 28PW6006, anygood?

[Rizel23]

I have found this TV at a good price and was wondering what the picture quality was like? I'd be mostly using it for DVDs as i want to upgrade my 21incd 4:3 TV.

Does it support RGB ect? Cheers, Rizel

[SithLordSi]

I'll tell you when mine arrives from Unbeatable.co.uk this week!

Seriously though, I looked at one in John Lewis (they were using it in their home theatre demo room) and was very impressed. The TV casing is pretty nice - 'silver' plastic with speakers either side, basic controls on the top (a neat idea, I thought), and A/V inputs on the side (just phono, no S-Video). It was sat on the open cabinet, which has a nice glass shelf. I got the assistant to plug in a DVD player so I could demo the picture and sound, and I was blown away. Watching Crouching Tiger, there was a lot of detail in the picture. The dark scenes in particular came alive with plenty of shadow detail. Colours were vibrant - a little over-saturated at first, but some tinkering in the setup menu soon solved that! The menus, by the way, are really cool - easy on the eye and simple to understand. Checking the picture modes there was 4:3 (with zero geometry problems - hoorah!), 16:9 (zoom, basically), widescreen (for anamorphic signals), 14:9 and a couple of other ones to fiddle with. It also automatically switches to the correct mode. So far so good. The sound was as expected - not hugely powerful, but more than adequate. It was fairly noisy in the shop, so I couldn't really hear it all that well. Still, if you've got an amp I'm sure that's the least of your worries. The set also has a built in FM radio, which I didn't get the chance to try out. Teletext had a number of cool functions, such as page memory and the ability to have two pages on screen at once. The two scarts on the back of the set were S-video and RGB compatible. Finally, the remote was easy enough to use and the buttons were nicely laid out.

All in all, a great set for the price (£380 at unbeatable.co.uk). I was particularly impressed with the solid, crips pictures and the lack of geometry problems. Don't be in any doubt about the quality of the TV, but demo it before you buy, incase you spot something I didn't. I can tell you more in a few days when I've had mine up and running for a bit with discs I know.

Hope this helps!

[John Jennings]

Yup, it's a good 'un. They also it without a stand for £319 if you don't need one.

Just one little correction to Si's post; it doesn't do the "two teletext pages at once" thing, you need to go up to the next Philips model (PW6315 or PW6515) to get that, but that costs many more sponduliks. It's not really such a useful feature, and who cares when the picture's this nice? :)

John

[Rizel23]

Thanks for all you advice, will go and have a demo in my local currys (sorry no John Lewis near me) I talk about how much i value there extra cover care!