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Rick Rizner
Rich colors, bright images, and good detail helped the 42PF9966/ 37 earn the second-highest overall score in our jury tests of eight plasma TVs. We awarded it top marks for color quality and its ability to display both standard definition TV and DVDs. Its high- definition quality was a bit lower, but still ranked at a respectable third place (behind the NEC PX-42XR3A and the Fujitsu P42HHA40US).
Despite its high display performance, however, this Philips has a few quirks. For starters, it's fussy about input formats. Using both 1080i and 480p input over HDMI, the TV struggled to display so- called multiburst patterns--diagnostic screens from the Avia Pro DVD kit that are designed for testing TVs. The multibursts feature six swaths of parallel vertical lines that become progressively finer from the left to the right of the screen. Most TVs could resolve all the groups, or at least all but the far-right group, which sometimes blurred out. But on this TV, image quality started breaking down at the first group on some screens, and...