Philips 42PFL3603D/F7 review: input lag, deinterlacing and upscaling using the piLagTesterPRO

This 1080P TV from 2009 looks good at 1080p but not so great at 720p & 480p/i. Input lag is middling and the display doesn't properly synchronize redraw with vsync. And it has an absurdly long model number. 

Overview/Image quality

This TV only really looks good at 1080P, where there's no aliasing and no cropping. At 720P and 480P there's no zoom setting that avoids some aliasing and ringing. A checkerboard made of 1-pixel wide black and white pixels gets rendered like the photo at right. Ugly in a sort of compellingly strange way.  Meanwhile a 45 degree line shows ugly ringing and aliasing artifacts. These aren't so obvious in 3D games but pixel art looks very bad because of this. 480i has a strange artifact where changes seem to "snap" in to place, I can't really describe it more clearly but let's just say that it looks bad, worse than other deinterlacing I've seen.  

It offers 3 HDMI inputs and a couple YPrPb inputs. 

Interestingly, this TV has upgradeable firmware. I haven't tried to see if it helps but the change log doesn't seem hopeful in that regard. It would be a fun hacking project indeed to see if you could totally change the TVs behavior by editing the firmware...

Input Lag

This display does not have a game mode. I toggled all the display quality settings and did not see a consistent effect on lag, however the tests reported are with every "enhancement" set to off. I used a piLagTesterPRO to measure input lag. This device sends a frame of video over HDMI and measures how long it takes to display it. Unfortunately this TV doesn't synchronize the panel refresh with the start of the video frame (vsync), so you get a different lag each time the TV (or game console) is powered on. Here I report the average, but the day-to-day lag will be +/- 8ms. 

I report two kinds of values. The minimum lag is the first point in time any change is detected at the top of the screen. This overly optimistic value doesn't tell you how long it takes to see anything useful, but matches what other reviewers use. I also report a more realistic measure of lag: when the display has reached 80% of full brightness at the bottom of the screen. This combines both input lag and response time, and is closer to what you would actually experience in a game.

Test results:

DisplayYear madeNative Resnative min lag480i real lag480p real lag720p real lag1080p real lagresponse timescan out
Dell U2410 (game)20101080p4.062.228.326.526.56.0016.20
Dell U2410 (sRGB)20101080p20.562.445.043.143.16.1316.13
Sony 40VL130 (game)20081080p22.866.349.047.347.39.0815.43
Sony 40S20L12007720p48.490.172.973.49.6014.00
Emprex HD 32022007720p27.0126.051.050.08.5015.00
LG 42LC2D2006720p28.354.650.850.46.3015.95
Vizio VO370M20101080p2.583.049.047.024.35.4715.67
Philips 42PFL3603D/F720091080p29.084.050.050.050.05.0016.00

Input lag is pretty poor for this TV no matter the resolution or interlacing. The only bright spot is the response time, which is better than any other TV I've seen. But because the lag is high and variable, I wouldn't recommend this set for gaming. 

And for those of you that want the raw values: 

480i top 1st480i top full480i bot 1st480i bot full480p top 1st480p top full480p bot 1st480p bot full720p top 1st720p top full720p bot 1st720p bot full1080p top 1st1080p top full1080p bot 1st1080p bot
 full
63687984293445502934455029344550

Every mode has the same lag, response time, etc, except for 480i, which of course is much slower do to deinterlacing. 

Conclusion

This would be a fine TV for watching movies or other video content but it's not great for gamers. The high and variable lag ruins it, as does the aliasing at  sub 1080p resolutions.

Other models

It appears that there are also 52" and 47" versions of this set. I assume they would have the same performance, but I made no effort to verify that the overlap in model numbers means the same video processing hardware. Here are the complete set: 52PFL3603D 47PFL3603D 42PFL3603D.

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