Philips Ambilight 32PFL9604H

The Philips Ambilight 32PFL9604 is the first television we’ve seen to offer something approaching full internet access.

That’s in addition to its other features, chief among them being a resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels, making it able to display 1080p pictures (useful if you have a new games console or Blu-ray player). There are five HDMI inputs, along with Scart, composite and component connections, so even the most tooled-up of households should be able to plug everything in.

All those inputs could get confusing, so Philips has made things easier by controlling everything through a Home button on the remote control. The Home screen has a list, with icons, of each device plugged into the set. Every time a new one is attached, the user can add an icon and tell the screen where’s it’s plugged in so that next time it can be selected by going to the Home screen and choosing Games Console, for example. If you prefer, you can still select inputs using the Source button on the remote control, which brings up a list of inputs.

The television stores picture and sound settings for each input, so you can have the games console set to use the bright, colourful Game picture settings but this won’t affect films watched from the DVD input.

A built-in media streamer allows the set to play music and video contained on any computer on your home network – it can connect wirelessly or through the wired network port on its rear. The same port is used for internet access. Some ‘channels’ are built-in, such as a Youtube viewer which worked well, and a rudimentary browser allows full web access. It’s not ideal – in fact, the experience is a lot like browsing the web on a phone because of the keypad-based navigation. It can’t cope with Flash-video-based sites such as the BBC iPlayer, which limits its use, but for occasional browsing it should work well. One annoyance was that the screen has to go through a connection procedure each time you access the network.

Another clever feature is Pixel Plus HD, which smoothes out the slightly jagged movement found on films – the smoother movement has the effect of making films look like they were shot on video.