Lets make things Worse!. Review on Philips Pixel Plus 36PW9308 Widescreen TV

Lets Make things worse! ? PHILIPS

The Philips 36? CRT Widescreen Pixel Plus TV which Philips markets in India since last year has glaring defects in what was supposed to be the USP of the product, the picture quality. Though the TV was launched in India only last year, it is not a new product to the world market and users around the globe has been complaining about this major flaw to Philips on which they have turned a blind eye. But at least Philips or their dealers in the global market has been responsible enough to take back the product and pay back the consumers since they did not have a solution to this flaw.

Probably the reason being that consumer laws in foreign countries are more stringent than in India. Thus maybe they decided to make India their junk yard and dupe customers here as its more easier in this country. Philips claim that their Pixel Plus model has outperformed the Sony Wega DRC models. The way Philips arranges stage for comparison it makes one think that their claim is true. They show their Pixel Plus model kept right beside the Sony DRC model for users to vote and judge for themselves.

On first look the Pixel Plus does seem ahead of the DRC due to its pixel enhancement chip and thus consumers falls for it. Poor consumers like us get to know much later that they have actually fallen in a grave with the love for this model.

About the flaw: The picture on a Philips Pixel Plus TV has got one horizontal and two vertical black bars which can be seen during picture playback. The problem seems to increase over time, thus possibly on a newer piece it is less visible and on a one year old piece its glaring. Most TVs comes with auto picture and color enhancement settings to brighten and enhance the image but these settings generally are not optimized from the viewers perspective and hide details in the picture. Even the Pixel plus comes with auto enhancement features turned on which some what hides the bars.

Any home theatre enthusiast would disable the auto picture enhancement features and would calibrate the picture settings with optimizers like THX or the Avia DVD. The bars are more visible after one calibrates the picture settings, after-all proper settings does show minute details and thus the bars too. The horizontal bar is right in the center of the screen, and one of the two vertical bar is in the center and the another one between the right edge of the screen and the center bar.

The horizontal bar is visible when the camera that is displaying the image on the screen pans up or down in fast movement giving an effect like picture noise. And the center vertical bar is visible during fast camera pans to right or left. All the bars are visible on dark screens during screen changes in some videos with brightness turned up and contrast down. All of these bars are most clearly visible under the IRE field test on the Avia home theatre calibration DVD. Surprisingly the center bars are also visible on the blue screen that the TV displays by default when no picture signal is available.

Consumer Woes and our great Indian Philips

Around 14 months back my love affair with the Pixel Plus started like most other does, i.e. love at first sight. So I ordered one set for myself. The set was due to come and I did some surfing over the net on consumer reviews and stumbled on the bar flaws. I got in touch with Philips instantly as I was the concerned lot, they assured me that such problem does not exist with the set.

So reluctantly I went ahead as I had already paid them on order. After I received the set I was able to see the vertical bars on some black scenes so I did wrote it in my feedback to them and expressed my concern that the problem does not grow over time. Unfortunately my concern was true with the reviews that I had read from other consumers world wide. After 12 months I see all the three bars very clearly which is very annoying. I?ve stopped enjoying the set over time.

Thus around 13th month I complained this strongly to Philips and I?m surprised and very disappointed the way they have handled the issue. There are other small defects like the on timer does not work and no PIP. The picture tube is not completely flat and they have an extra piece of flat glass in front to give it a more flattish effect.

Also on measure I did not find it to be 36 inch as they claim it to be. Infact talking about the knowledge of their engineers, when I told them it was not 36 inch the fellow tried to measure it horizontally rather than diagonally, maybe he did it purposefully.

Philips has been acting much like any other local Indian vendor would do 5 years back. Even local vendors have now realized that customer satisfaction and trust is what they need to thrive in the emerging competitive market. Initially their technical manager came over and when I showed him video clips where one could see the bars, he denied that any flaw was visible, then we looped the camera pan action and one of his accomplice said he was able to see a very slight white horizontal bar. After weeks of follow up they escalated the matter to their country technical head and he in turn escalated it to their world research and development team, probably at Belgium.

This smelt rat as with all those consumers world wide complaining about the same thing and Philips behaving as if I?m the only one to see the bars. To my horror, now Philips says that they are willing to rectify a problem if it exists, so they sent another team of two engineers to observe the problem. This time I had the Avia DVD and I showed the bars very clearly to them on the IRE field test and also on the blue screen that the TV diaplays when not fed with signals.

Since the engineers were not able to deny these bars on the IRE test and the blue screen thus they wanted to see it on a running video to conclude that the model has a flaw. I arranged these tests only because they denied that they were able to see it on a running video in the first place which they denied again. This time I called up their technical manager and he said he has escalated what his engineers has seen and did not take any stance as to the flaw exists or not.

I guess Philips has an excellent recipe on hand heading for doom. They do not know the basic of winning consumer satisfaction and trust, rather the only thing they know is to push a faulty product down one?s throat and then turn a blind eye to the help cry. I remember having bought a DVD player of a Korean make early in the days of DVDs in India. The case was similar in nature, the player does not used to play a good number of DVDs and finally they replaced the set with a new model that had come up after around 12 months.

My trust in the brand did not get affected seeing their commitment towards their consumers. Today I buy products of the same Korean brand and feel a sense of security. They knew how to grow long term !

Fellow Consumers: This is to all my fellow consumers. If you have bought the Pixel Plus TV and have never realized that it had such defects, then my advice would be not to search for it as when you would finally see it you would stop enjoying it. And for those who were thinking to buy it, you can easily find the reviews over the web by little effort of exploring.

I would never suggest anyone to go for anything that is Philips no matter how good the product appeal is to you. The basic fact is that the vendor lacks commitment.