Philips 40PFL5706

Philips 40PFL5706/F7

As good picture quality is expensive to implement and difficult to explain, manufacturers seeking to differentiate between scads of televisions are turning to increasingly esoteric extras like passive or active 3D, 120Hz/240Hz/480Hz, QWERTY remote controls, and laundry lists of streaming video services. Philips has a new one: Wi-Fi MediaConnect. The feature, available on the PFL5706/F7 series reviewed here, enables the TV to display whatever's on the screen of a laptop PC that's running special software, without a wired connection between the two. When it works the system functions well, but after our initial "Wow, cool!" reaction, we found MediaConnect's appeal more limited than most of those other extras. After all, isn't the point of Internet TV to ditch your PC altogether, or at least make its interface more like a DVR and less like a computer? Moreover, there are devices that provide the same function that work better than MediaConnect, as we'll discuss below. If you must have wireless PC projection built in, however, and don't mind this TV's mediocre picture quality, Philips is the only game in town. We performed a hands-on evaluation of the 40-inch Philips 40PFL5706/F7, but this review also applies to the other screen sizes in the series.