Philips 65PFL9708 review

This isn't a particularly strong area for the 65PFL9708S. Things start quite well with a reasonably detailed and thoughtful initial installation process, but thereafter things can be a bit tortuous.

The main onscreen menus are rather bland and tend to present the huge amount of options on offer in long text lists, which can make them feel intimidating and long-winded to use.

With this in mind it doesn't help that you'll likely find yourself heading into the onscreen menus to make tweaks to picture settings more regularly than you would with most TVs.

There's room for improvement with Philips' Smart TV interface too. The main problem is that it doesn't make very efficient use of its available screen real estate, forcing you to have to scroll through multiple content screens despite the very limited amount of apps at your disposal.

It doesn't help that a large section of the screen is devoted to a window that's either used for promoting apps or presenting 'recommended' video choices that are rendered next to useless by the fact that the recommendations are only drawn from a couple of very limited content sources.

One good touch where using the set's Smart features is concerned is the provision of a full QWERTY keyboard on the rear side of the remote control. It's good to find, too, that the Smart menus operate more quickly and slickly than they do on Philips' cheaper TVs, thanks to the 65PFL9708S's use of a six-core processing engine.

Sound quality

Pictures as large and high resolution as those produced by the 65PFL9708S deserve to be joined by a large, high-quality soundstage. And that's exactly what Philips' set delivers.

The most pleasant surprise is that despite the 65PFL9708S being reasonably trim, woofer speakers on its rear manage to churn out much more powerful and refined bass than we're accustomed to hearing from flat TVs. This bass doesn't sound baggy or over-exposed either, thanks to the way the TV's mid-range is wide and open enough to expand down to meet the low-frequency stuff.

At the other end of the audio spectrum the 65PFL9708S delivers involving amounts of treble detail that bring out even the most subtle parts of a good audio mix without sounding harsh or over-dominant.

There's still not quite as much overall clarity in the 65PFL9708S's soundstage as you'd hear if the TV sported front-firing speakers like Sony's 65X9005A, but it remains a superior audio effort overall.

Value

This is the 65PFL9708S's trump card. For at £4,500, it's £500 cheaper than any 65-inch 4K rival, and a full grand cheaper than most. This fact is made all the more impressive, moreover, by the fact that it's still an excellent performer with a fulsome feature count.