Philips’ 32PFL9632D is fearsomely specified by 32in LCD TV standards.  

For starters, it comes with one of the most powerful and comprehensive picture processing engines known to man: the immodestly titled Perfect Pixel Engine HD.  

This box of tricks works on a long list of picture elements to make them as good as they can be.

Powerful and well-featured LCD

Highlights include a 100Hz element to improve the clarity of motion; an HD Natural Motion circuit to improve the fluidity of motion; 14-bit colour processing to improve the smoothness of colour blends; specialist 24fps processing; and the same sort of top-drawer scaling and detail-boosting processing that so  distinguished the Perfect Pixel Engine’s  predecessor, Pixel Plus 3.

Another key feature of the 32PFL9632D is obvious as soon as you look at it. Ambilight, Philips’ exclusive technology, throws out pools of coloured LED light from the TV’s sides that can be actively sympathetic to the colour content of the image you’re watching, apparently making long-term viewing feel more relaxing and immersive.

Outstanding pictures

The 32PFL9632D scores more points for its connections, including three v1.3 HDMI jacks, a component video port, and even a USB input for direct playback of JPEG stills and MP3 files.

With a dynamic backlight system also promising a high contrast ratio of 8,000:1, there’s really only one number that’s a touch disappointing – the TV’s non-Full HD resolution of 1366 x 768.

But, as you’d hope from such a strongly featured TV, the 32PFL9632D’s picture quality with TV and HD video sources is outstanding.

It delivered terrific fine detailing, extremely rich and well-saturated colours, impressively rich black levels and superb suppression of practically all noise types.  

Sluggish processing

Movement looks clear and smooth too. Console games look great at first glance.  Playing Forza Motorsport, cars look amazingly crisp and real, courses flash by smoothly and colourfully, and black cars look as dark as we’d hoped. Job done, then?

Not quite. The 32PFL9632D has a significant chink in its armour as a gaming machine – response time. All that high-level image processing causes pictures to be delayed slightly in their journey to the screen, meaning that your reaction times to other vehicles are fractionally out.