Aesthetically the Philips 42PFL6188S is pleasing enough. Its well-built black frame is on trend with its skinny width, and it expands cutely along the bottom edge where your eye then runs down to the set’s sultry metallic, open-framed desktop stand.
This being a Philips TV, there’s also Ambilight to consider, which casts the familiar pools of coloured light from the TV’s left and right edges. You can opt to have this coloured light match with a startlingly degree of colour and location accuracy the colour content of the image you’re watching.
People who prefer their TVs to blend into the background might think Ambilight sounds hideous. But actually it can increase your immersion in what you’re watching while also making the viewing experience more relaxing – so long, at least, as you make sure the feature is set to a relatively gentle level of ‘dynamism’.
Hooking our test sources up to the Philips 42PFL6188S reveals a pleasingly comprehensive array of connections for the set’s £850 price point. These include four HDMIs, three USBs for playback of photo/music/video multimedia files from USB storage devices, and built-in Wi-Fi for either streaming multimedia from DLNA PCs or going online with Philips’ latest Smart TV platform.
