26" LCD TVs: Are They Ready for Prime Time?

Equipment

The monitor has fairly complete connectivity, with 3 Peritel connectors, DVI, S-Video, and of course, cinch connectors for audio and video.

Philips 26PF9946/12: Flashy Colors

Light colors were reproduced well, but dark colors were a disaster. It was possible to attain 6500K, but again, the gamma was not quite up to requirements.

The panel's brightness was very high - too high, even, for family use, which is what we're interested in. To watch a movie you do have to be a minimum distance from the screen, but that's not enough to justify this kind of brightness. The result is that the black level is too high, at 1.23 nits. A value like that would cause us to automatically reject a computer monitor. In the context of the high brightness, these blacks are more acceptable. But it's still too high a brightness level for our liking.