Philips 42PF7320A 42-Inch Widescreen Plasma HDTV

Product Review

Get more out of your viewing experience with the incredible Philips 42PF7320A 42" Plasma Flat HDTV. With its superior picture quality, incredible PDP technology and Pixel Plus display, you'll have crisp, vivid natural pictures from any video source. You can even connect your portable digital camera or hard drive to the TV through the USB 1.1 port, and share music and photos thorugh it. It's the ultimate digital multimedia station for your home theater or home entertainment center.

Amazon.com Product Review

Save space and enjoy a wonderfully vivid picture with the stylish, 42-inch Philips 42PF7320A widescreen plasma TV, a great choice for your full-featured entertainment center. It has a built-in 181-channel NTSC tuner for standard television broadcasts, and you can receive high-definition TV right out of the box with the optional, removable CableCARD, which picks up HD (ATSC) broadcasts from your digital cable provider (digital cable subscription required). This set includes a tabletop stand, but it's also wall-mountable with optional kit (VESA compatible). This plasma TV includes an anti-ageing circuit to help prevent screen burn-in and an anti-reflective coating on the screen.

This set uses Philips' exclusive Pixel Plus video processor to increase the number of lines and the number of pixels. The result is razor sharp pictures with incredible detail and dept, every time from any source.

The 42PF7320A has a 1024 x 768-pixel resolution, 160-degree viewing angle, a 1500 cd/m2 (candela per square meter) brightness rating, and a 10000:1 contrast ratio. (The higher the contrast ratio, the greater a TV's ability to display subtle color details and not get washed out by ambient room light.) Other features include picture-in-picture display (via component and HDMI connections), auto volume leveler, adjustable color temperature and sharpness, sleep timer, and V-Chip parental controls.

The 3D comb filter separates brightness and color signals better in 3D domain to eliminate cross-color, cross-luminance and dot-crawl distortion. It performs field-by-field comparisons of the television image to accurately separate the color from the black-and-white information and remove both horizontally and vertically hanging dots, as well as dot crawl, resulting in a razor sharp image. This set also performs 3:2 pulldown detection and reversal, too--a handy feature for watching progressive-scan movie programs in their native 24-frame format. To adapt 24 frames-per-second movies to 30 fps video, frames in the original movie must be duplicated; 3:2 pulldown digitally corrects this duplication by removing the redundant information to display a frame-accurate picture.

The Active Control function uniquely and intelligently optimizes picture quality by measuring and analyzing the incoming signal to automatically adjust picture quality settings. Active Control with Light Sensor uses a sensor to adjust the picture brightness depending on the room light conditions.

This TV has two built-in stereo speakers that produce 15 watts per channel (for 30 watts of total power), and can produce Dolby Digital virtual surround sound, emulating a 5.1-channel sound field from just two speakers. It also offers the following connections:

• Composite AV (RCA) In: 3 (1 side)
• S-Video In: 3 (1 side)
• Component Video In (Y PB PR): 2
• HDMI In: 2
• RF In: 1
• PC Audio In: 1
• PC Audio Out: 1
• Monitor Out: 1
• USB: 1
• Headphone: 1

The USB connector allows access to multimedia JPEG, MP3, MP3-PRO, and ALB (photo slideshow) files of most USB memory drives and most digital cameras (USB 1.1 memory-class device). Plug the USB connector into the slot at the side of the TV and access your photos or music files.

Tech Talk
CableCARD -- The CableCARD system enables the "Plug-and-Play DTV" functionality as agreed between cable operators and consumer electronics manufacturers. It allows the decoding of encrypted or scrambled content delivered from the cable system. CableCARD functionality includes conditional access and copy protection. A CableCARD-enabled television without a CableCARD inserted receives high-definition standard TV broadcasts. When a CableCARD is inserted, the television receives high-value high-definition, cable programming.

HDMI -- HDMI makes an uncompressed digital RGB connection from the source to the screen. By eliminating conversion to an analog signal, it delivers an unblemished image. The non-degraded signal reduces flicker and leads to a clearer picture. HDMI intelligently communicates the highest output resolution with the source device. The HDMI input is fully backward compatible with DVI sources but includes digital audio. HDMI uses HDCP copy protection.

What's in the Box
Plasma TV, remote control (with batteries), tabletop stand, power cord, printed operating instructions

Customer Reviews