Philips 26PF5521D/10

The Philips 26PF5521D/10 is a 26-inch LCD HDTV with built-in Freeview tuner and at less than £600 on Amazon, represents excellent value for money.

The 1366 x 768 pixel resolution is large enough to display 720p HDTV pictures natively and scaled-down 1080p in 16:9 format. It has a respectable contrast ratio of 600:1 and an 8-millisecond response time. Like most flat screen TVs, the Philips 26PF5521D/10 employs a raft of proprietry technologies designed by Philips to improve picture quality. The Crysta Clear package includes a 3D digital comb filter which eliminates dot crawl and colour bleeding, and enhances fine detail, as well as cleaning up image outlines and removing extraneeous colours. The Dynamic Contrats, another Philips proprietry technology deepens blacks and purifies whites, according to the manufacturer.

The 5W speakers which sit either side of the screen aren't especially poerful, but are fairly standard for this size of TV. They support Virtual Dolby Surround which gives an impression of surround sound and also include Philips' Smart Listeningtechnology which is designed to eliminate sharp spikes in volumes such as those that make you jump out of your skin when an ad break starts.

The 176-degree viewing angle should mean that you see the same picture and colours no matter where you are in the room and the 100 preset channels should be enough even if you subscribe to every Sky or cable channel going. There are also presets for picture and audio settings,

Importantly, as well as a couple of SCART sockets, it has an HDMI input and component inputs. So if, say you have Sky's HD box or Telewest's TV Drive, you can plug them into the HDMI socket and plug your progressive scan DVD player into the component inputs, ensuringthe highest quality for both TV and DVD. There also composite and S-Video inputs for connecting a camorder or digital stills camera.

All in all the Philips 26PF5521D/10 is an impressively specified HDTV for the price.