Philips Ambilight 32PFL9604H

While the set was certainly easy to use – and the icon-based home screen helped a lot – it was occasionally irritating. Response to the remote control was slow at times – we had to press certain buttons several times to get a response.

What with all the clever features to load, it also takes several seconds to get a picture when you switch the TV on, which is annoying for those of us used to less smart TVs that work more quickly.

It also had a problem with non-widescreen programmes and films – there’s no way to make it show such things in full with black bars at the sides; instead the set zooms in to the middle of the picture. While we can understand Philips’s aesthetic reasons for doing this, it’s annoying not to have control over the picture, and for some programs it meant important parts of the picture were lost.

Sound was impressive, however. It’s not a particularly loud television, but quality was impressive, with good bass and treble, certainly for television programmes. For films a dedicated speaker setup would still be better, but we were perfectly happy to listen to explosion-heavy blockbusters using the built-in speakers.

It looks good, with an understated brushed dark grey bezel, and the rounded corners make a nice change from all those angular screen designs.

The Ambilight feature introduced a few years ago remains – it lights the back and sides of the TV with whatever colours are on screen, to give the effect of making the picture look bigger. We like this feature, especially when the set is put into a corner, which is when it worked best, but it’s easy to switch off if it irritates.

In the modern HD world, standard terrestrial television seems like the least important thing, but the set coped well with that too – it has a DVB-T (Freeview) tuner, and automatically picked up all the channels when we plugged an aerial cable in.

Television broadcasts being decidedly low-definition, they didn’t look as good as the output from a Blu-ray player, but the set did a good job of stretching the picture to the big screen, and at a decent viewing distance (around five feet) the picture was very impressive.

For a 32in TV, £850 is expensive, but for a top-quality set such as this one, it’s worth paying.