This Philips plasma flatscreen television is outclassed by other plasma TVs in the 42" size

There are speakers on the left and right sides of the screen. It weighs 93-pounds plasma and is deeper and wider than most flat panels. It measures 49 by 27 by 4 inches.

The Philips 42PF9630A’s native resolution is 1,024x768. This Philips plasma flatscreen television scales any incoming source, including 1080i and 720p HDTV, DVD, and standard-def, to fit the available pixels.

Philips's uses its proprietary “Ambilight” feature (a pair of rear fluorescent lights that cast colors onto the wall behind the set) which doesn’t help its picture quality compete with other quality plasmas.

Its settings are a mixture of red, green, and blue, which adversely affect your perception of the color coming from the screen. This can sometimes be distracting and takes away from the viewing experience.

This Philips plasma flatscreen television has an onboard ATC tuner that allows you to get over-the-air HDTV broadcasts. It also ha s a Cablecard slot and a Dual-tuner for PIP (not with two high-def sources). Like other plasmas you can’t adjust aspect ratio with a high-def signal.

The Philip’s 42PF9630A's remote is well designed and intuitive but its internal menu system is awkward and frustrating to navigate.

The Philips 42PF9630A's picture adjustments has only a handful of picture presets and is the only plasma in its class that lacks an independent memory for each input. On the plus side it has a bevy of connections.

For starters it has two HDMI inputs, analog connections, component video, S-Video, composite video, analog audio and coaxial digital audio. As mentioned ealier it has the CableCard slot, a coaxial digital audio output, an RF input, a set of A/V outputs with composite video, and a set of side-panel A/V inputs for S-Video or composite video.

There’s also a collection of multimedia connections, including a pair of USB ports and two slots that between them will accept Microdrives and just about every type of media card allowing you to play MP3s or display JPEGs on the screen.

Summary: The Philips 42PF9630A's picture quality is just adequate. Like many other inferior plasmas its inability to produce the deep blacks weaken its impact in the dim light of typical home theaters. The blacks look like dark grey.

Even after professional calibration there is too much drift in color variation at different brightness levels (specifically with the green colors). The picture sometimes appears soft and this Philips plasma flatscreen television did not do a good job of scaling down a DVD image.

The Philips 42PF9630A picture quality can’t compete with Panasonic, Pioneer, and Fujitsu. Although this full-featured plasma flatscreen television has style it’s too expensive to be a true contender with the current crop of 42 “plasma TVs.