Philips 50 inch HDTV-Ready Plasma Television Review

The first thing that strikes you when you look at this unit is the stylish slim frame-within-a-frame design. Silver finish with black frame around the display, which increases the unit's overall size by a few inches. The unit's weight is 50 Kg and its dimensions are: 1415 x 780 x 104 mm (without the stand).

Installing the Philips 50PF7320 couldn't be easier. The unit is Plug & Play.

The menus are simple and easy to use but be prepared to spend 10-15 minutes setting the unit.

The High Definition plasma WXGA panel boasts 1366 x 768 pixel resolution and includes Pixel Plus processor, which increases the number of lines and pixels. The result is razor sharp pictures with great detail.

It also includes progressive scan to double the vertical resolution of the image. An added advantage of the Philips plasma screen is that the screen has an anti-reflection coated screen. It also offers a brightness of 1500 cd/m2 with a contrast ratio of 10000:1 and aspect ratio of 16:9.
Another important feature of the Philips 50PF7320 Plasma TV is the Active Control plus Light Sensor feature. Active Control maesures the incoming signal and automatically adjusts the picture quality settings accordingly. Active Control with Light Sensor uses a sensor to automatically adjust the picture brightness depending on the room light conditions to give you the best picture in any light conditions.
The Philips 50PF7320 Plasma TV supports Virtual Dolby Surround and Nicam Digital Stereo. It comes with 2 built in loud speakers that deliver good sound reproduction (30 watts in total), although we recommend you to connect the unit to a Surround Sound System for optimal cinema-like audio experience. You can adjust the sound settings using the 5 band equaliser or by selecting one of the sound modes (Movie, Voice, Music and Personal).

The connectivity options on the Philips 50PF7320 are a bit of a let down. It's capable of accepting analogue/component and digital HD video as well as PC feeds, but unfortunately, all the feeds have to be taken through the same single DVI jack, which means having to swap connections around manually. And there are only 2 scart sockets to play around with! In addition to this, the Philips 50PF7320 includes audio L/R in mini jack 3.5mm, CVBS in, Headphone out and S video in.

There is only one word to describe the picture quality of the Philips 50PF7320: average.

Using standard definition, the image suffers from multiple noise types, inluding grain, dot crawl, occasional shimmering and smearing and over motion. The colours are not perfect either: the reds look a bit orangey and flesh has a greenish tone. Colour blends are not well graduated and will make skin tones look a bit plasticky. But it's not all bad news as the screen can be calibrated to the recommended colour specification of 6500k.There is also a brightness/contrast imbalance that will make some dark scenes look too dark using settings that look fine with bright scenes.

The main selling point of the Philips 50PF7320 is the impressive black level, that gives solidity to the image. Using HD sources like HDTV broadcast, Blu-ray DVD or HDTV, the image quality is much better, sharp and bright.