New Philips 32PW9576 revisions

[siwatkins]

Until this morning, I had a Philips 32PW9576 and the picture quality on a poor quality source wasn't brilliant - either because of the 100Hz processing, or poor noise reduction. Give it a good digital source and it was great though.

However, 2 months on, I've just taken a replacement delivery of a Philips 32PW9576 same model, but a different revision, from
brand new stock - the original revision set that I had, suffered from some colour staining and focus issues so was rejected by me. The replacement, which I've had to wait for delivery from the manufacturers to the supplier, has undergone a major revision in the 2 months that I've been waiting to sort this out.

Interestingly, this new revision by Philips also comes with Digital Natural Motion processing (the previous one I had didn't have it), and a very refined version at that. It also has a couple of other Digital modes. More importantly, it looks like the Philips engineers have been tweaking this set, in both hardware and software big time. PSU regulation is heaps better - perfect in fact, geometry is nigh on perfect as you are gonna get with a tube - can't fault it, and I'm a fussy bugger! Convergence is brilliant, and the image quality is the best that I've seen on a 32" set anywhere.

I'm chuffed to monkeys that I had to wait whilst they got some
fresh stock in!!!

The only downside I can see with this set versus the one it replaced, is that they've decided to reduce the number of RGB capable scarts. This new revision comes with 3 scarts (same as before), but whereas in the old revision, Scarts 1 & 2 were RGB capable, in this revision, just Scart 1 of the 3 is capable of an RGB input. Not a big issue for me, as I needed Scart 2 on the old one for the Nextlink stuff for the VCR anyway.

Anyway, this new software from Philips rocks. They have addressed all the minor criticisms that I had with the old model and then some. The Digital Sig Processing is the best I've seen. Terrestial sources look great, and digital sources are stunning. On terrestial sources, there is a tiny bit of edge sharpening shimmer, but cut the sharpness down a tadge, and set the
contrast correctly from the defaults, and picture is Ace.

If anyone is thinking of getting one of these sets (And I now highly recommend that you consider it if you are in the market for a 32"), make sure that the mains plug holder in the back panel is on the same side as the scarts (it was on the opposite side in the old revision). The old set was good, but the revisions in the new set are a must have.

Don't settle for old stock on this one - the new revision is brilliant. Hope the information is of use to someone. It is the best looking set out there (IMHO of course :-)

Simon