Philips had one of the smaller booths for what we consider to be a major brand, although it has never been quite such a strong brand in the US as it is in Europe.
The first product we looked at was the BDL4780VH which is a 2,000 cd/m² unit that has full 24/7 capability and will be available at the end of August. The product is for professional applications and has features including IR and USB lockout and an OPS slot. It’s one of Philips’ SmartCMS units.
The BDL8470QT is a touch version of the 84″ UltraHS that we reported on from ISE. It has 10 touch points and is rated for 16/7 use. Again it will be available in August. It has a QuadView feature to allow four FullHD inputs to be mapped onto the display. The BD9870U 98″ set also has this feature.
Like others, Philips has been updating its display sizes (to 43″/49″ and 55″) as panel makers have increased and a new model in the ’70’ series is the 49″ BDL4970EL which is a 24/7 duty cycle model. It has symmetric 5.9mm bezels and includes 16GB of internal memory. Philips has a fallover mode so that if connections to the SmartCMS function fails, the display can use the internal memory to display quite sophisticated graphics.
Finally, we looked at the 48″ BDL4835QL which has AmbiLight (it was being promoted also at the entrance to the show). We heard that Ambilight is getting a good reception as it helps retailers, especially, to attract attention to the displays at very low incremental cost.
