After years of announcements from just about every TV manufacturer, we've finally got our hands on one of the first commercially-available TVs to use LEDs for backlighting.

The new technology promises to bring amazing improvements co contrast--taking scores up as high as 1 000  000:1--as well as all round excellent display quality.

To make it work, dozens of individual LEDs work individually to provide a different amount of light for each area of the screen, rather than having a single lamp.

With a 42'' matte screen, this 42PFL9803H from Philips is the first such TV to pass through ours labs.

It supports Full HD, and has an integrated digital tuner to decode HD TV signals too.

Despite the innovate technology inside the TV, the outside looks much the same as other models that the manufacturer has released this year.

Philips' beloved Ambilight technology relies on yet more LEDs along each side of the frame which change in color and brightness to match the wall color behind the TV to each edge of the picture.

The idea is to provide a gentle extra light source that doesn't clash with what's on the screen so you're not left watching movies in pitch black.

The system also increases the perceived quality of contrast: even a grayish screen looks reasonably black in a brightly-lit room, after all.

Getting Connected

Things are much the same as ever on the back, too, with four HDMI ports, including one on the left hand side, two SCART inputs, a component video port and a composite, an Ethernet port to connect to DLNA compatible devices, an S-Video input, as well as VGA and USB inputs.

A PCMCIA slot for decrypting subscription channels is also built-in.

As with earlier models, the remote control features a scroll wheel which could still do with a bit of work: it's not responsive enough to navigate quickly through the menus and the cursor sometimes moves randomly. 

We got fed up with it and ended up using the traditional directional arrows instead.

Given that this TV is part of a new generation, we were a little disappointed to be confronted by the 'old' Panasonic menus when we first switched it on, but then discovered a new configuration assistant tool.

It's certainly not suitable for calibrating professional equipment, but it does give average users a quick and easy way of setting things up the way they want.

Purists are more likely to dive in and turn off some of the more dubious filters like active color and dynamic contrast to get a more faithful representation of audio and video content.

Black Is Black

Our first lab tests gave threw up some extraordinary results, not least of which was a brightness level for black of exactly 0 cd/m². 

Such a perfect score is only achieved in areas of the screen that are entirely dark. 

On more 'normal' images, with a mix of light and dark zones, black brightness rarely falls below 0.2 cd/m² and sometimes reaches 0.3 cd/m², which is less impressive.

Depending on how the screen is calibrated, that results in an average ANSI contrast ratio of between 1500:1 and 1150:1, or fairly close to what you'd expect from a Home Cinema system.

It's still along way from the 1 000 000:1 that Philips claims for this TV.

In common with other manufacturers, Philips is careful to note that the scores it advertises are based on dynamic contrast, but the confusion that this race for ever-higher contrast ratios creates can only serve to confuse the consumers.

Philips is certainly not the only offender in this area, but now seems as good a moment as ever to stress that you definitely shouldn't let a manufacturer's publicity claims about contrast sway your judgment too much.


Viewing Tests

When it's connected to a Blu-ray player, this TV gives excellent results, but the problems with the HD Natural Motion (HDNM) system becomes apparent all too quickly.

This visual filter, a little like Sony's Motionfolow system or Samsung's Motion Plus is designed to make moving images appear more fluid by interpolating extra frames in between those supplied by the source.

In theory, this means that you can take a 24 frames per second movie and crank it up to 100 fps, but interpolating to create the average of two frames is not as easy as it sounds.

Depending on how you configure these systems, errors can be more or less noticeable.

The problem with Philips' HDNM implementation is that these miscalculations are visible even when the system is at its lowest setting.

This means you're faced with a choice: either accept the imperfections and enjoy fluid images with no ghosting, or turn HDNM off and risk jumpy, ghosted images, depending on the frame rate of your source.

Another problematic filter on this TV was the application of dynamic contrast.

As you can see from the image below, it can completely wipe out details in the aim of improving contrast.

When it comes to upscaling Standard Definition sources to a bigger screen, the results are very average, and nowhere near the performance of our standard reference, Sony's Playstation 3.

In general, poor quality SD sources look pretty dreadful.

Moving from one side of the screen to the other, the viewing angles are wide enough in terms of color, but the brightness levels fluctuate when more than three or four people are sat in a row.

Conclusion

The pictures on this TV are well above average compared to the rest of the market for the end of 2008, but are still far from exceptional.

We're pretty disappointed by these modest improvements given all the hype surrounding LED backlighting.