Philips 65PFL9708 review

The 9708 can upscale Full HD footage to Ultra HD thanks to its Ultra Resolution feature, but this produced a slightly grainy image that only appeared a little sharper than it did with the Ultra Resolution feature switched off. Hair, facial features and clothing looked more natural when upscaled compared to viewing the same footage at Full HD resolution, but only up close. Differences were minimal from a distance, even on the 9708’s 65in screen.

Although Ultra Resolution can add a little extra detail to Blu-ray films, it simply can’t rescue standard definition broadcasts. Low bit-rate channels such as Dave and BBC News are pretty much unsalvageable, so we saw compression noise and a lack of detail when watching those channels.

Overall, the 9708’s Ultra HD 2D picture quality was above average but hardly groundbreaking. Excellent black levels are possible, even from the edge-lit backlight, and colour and contrast can produce fantastic looking images, but only if you take the time to tweak the presets. As is common with Philips TVs, the 9708 uses passive 3D technology. Passive 3D has zero flicker, almost no crosstalk and minimal reduction in brightness. It’s also much harder to spot the reduced vertical resolution when watching 3D content, which is a major bonus over existing 1080p passive 3D TVs.

The 9708 produces surprisingly clear and powerful audio. At higher volume levels, the 9708 impressed us with its dynamic range and the TV even produced a reasonable amount of bass.

Unfortunately, we were unimpressed with the speed of the onscreen interface. We often waited for the TV to respond to the remote control when we changed menus or used smart TV apps. The online services provided by the 9708 are fewer in number than we’d like. Philips has steadily grown the number of services and you can use BBC iPlayer, Netflix and YouTube to find entertainment, but there’s no LoveFilm, ITV Player, 4oD or Demand 5. Philips has integrated Facebook and Twitter in to the 9708 very well. The TV places a sidebar at the side of the currently playing channel so that you can post as you watch TV. The most welcome new feature is Cloud Explorer, which lets you stream multimedia content from your Dropbox web storage.

The online services provided by Philips’ TVs are getting better, but we still found the 9708’s smart TV interface to be sluggish and less user-friendly than Samsung’s Smart Hub or Sony’s SEN. Currently, the 9708 is one of the cheapest Ultra HD TVs you can buy in the UK. Even at 65in, the 9708 costs significantly less than the competition. However, lack of a HDMI 2.0 input and the delicate balance of settings required to get the best from it mean you’ll still make sacrifices for early adoption.