Philips 47PFL7403D 47" 120khz 1080p LCD HDTV Review

My wife and I have had our eye on a certain TV at Sam's Club for a while, and a couple of months ago we finally decided to buy it after the price dropped. We bought a Philips 47PFL7403D 47" 1080p LCD HDTV. It's widescreen and has all the top-of-the-line features that made it a great buy. We've been pricing our HDTV's for a while and wanted to make sure we got the best we could find for our money, and this TV fit the bill. It was $1394.

One of the reasons we got this TV was for its high refresh rate of 120khz. Some of the cheaper HDTV's only refresh at 60khz. The refresh rate is how quickly the TV can redraw the screen during motion, and it makes a big difference when playing video games. A lower refresh rate on a cheaper TV can sometimes produce a 'ghosting' effect where you see trailing images on screen when things move quickly. With this HDTV, it's never a problem, even when playing very fast-paced shooting games on the PS3.

I have a Sony PlayStation 3 video game console, which is also a Blu-Ray movie player. We'd watched a couple of Blu-Rays on my old TV, but it wasn't widescreen and you couldn't really even tell the difference. With this new television, the picture quality is incredible. It is so incredibly bright and realistic that it actually takes some getting used to because we had become so accustomed to dimmer, slightly fuzzy movies on DVD. Comparing Blu-Ray to DVD is like comparing DVD to VHS. You may think you can't tell the difference, but with the right equipment you really can.

We do not have Cable or Satellite at our house, but instead use a $20 amplified antennae we bought from Wal-Mart. This TV has a digital tuner built in, and so we are able to pick up local HD channels right from the air. If you like to watch football, you don't know what you've been missing until you see a game in its full HD widescreen glory on a TV this size. Needless to say, we are ready for the 'big switch' next year when all broadcasts go digital.

DVD's look pretty good on this TV, but you have to keep in mind that DVD picture quality is only 480p while Blu-Ray is 1080p, so the quality difference is noticeable. I have an older DVD player that does not upscale the picture, so the result is some grainy fuzzy edges on some things. I highly recommend you get an upscaling DVD player and connect it with an HDMI cable for this type television. Otherwise, the TV has to expand the DVD video to fit the screen, and anybody who has ever blown up a photo knows there is always quality loss when doing so.

The bottom line here is that this is a truly great TV that has all the best features, the highest available picture quality (1080p), the highest refresh rate (120khz), and a very high contrast ratio (29,000:1). For the money, this is an excellent choice. Similar HDTV's with the same features can cost more than two thousand dollars.