LCOS Review 

 

By Theater Mag: 

The Philips Cineos is more than just a new TV, however. The display 

utilizes a relatively new technology called Liquid Crystal on Silicon 

(LCOS), which creates an image in a display that's about half as deep 

as a typical CRT-based rear-projection system. LCOS is like a cross 

between liquid crystal display (LCD) and Digital Light Processing 

(DLP). Like LCD, LCOS uses millions of crystals to create the picture. 

Like DLP, the crystals in an LCOS display are reflective, not 

transmissive. So, rather than shining through the crystals, the light 

in an LCOS display reflects off of the crystals' surfaces and toward 

the screen. If a pixel needs to be bright, its crystal is reflective; 

if a pixel needs to be dark, its crystal becomes clear, allowing the 

light to pass through it and into an absorber. Compared with DLP, LCOS 

is tougher to manufacture in quantity, but it can create a similarly 

high-resolution display with an equally tight pixel structure. The 

Cineos' 1,280:720 resolution makes it high-definition-capable.  

 

To go up against the competition, the Cineos 44PL977S uses more than 

just high-definition resolution. In addition to the TV's slim, sleek, 

silver cabinet design, Philips has added a host of other 

consumer-friendly features, like a DVI input with HDCP. This is just 

one of seven inputs that the display offers. Others include three 

basic audio and video inputs that also provide S-video connections, 

one of which offers an interlaced-only component DVD connection. An 

RGB input and two more component inputs are geared toward interlaced, 

progressive, and high-definition video. An RF input accepts signals 

from your antenna or cable system, and a single A/V monitor output 

lets you run the signal to another piece of equipment. Last but not 

least, the TV's front panel sports an A/V input with S-video, ready 

and waiting for your Xbox or PlayStation console. The latter console 

is a perfect companion, given this set's lack of burn-in. You should 

be able to connect nearly anything and everything to this display.  

 

Having a number of inputs may not do you much good, though, if you 

can't optimize the picture for each source. Fortunately, with this 

display, you can optimize the picture, and you'll want to. My review 

sample wasn't well optimized at the factory (at least not for a decent 

picture). Both dark and light images lacked detail, there was a fair 

amount of video noise, and the picture had a number of motion 

artifacts. It doesn't help that several of the preset picture-control 

preferences exacerbate the issues. Philips claims that they've 

resolved these issues and that the final production units have 

improved factory settings.  

 

While I haven't seen the final settings, I do know that careful tuning 

will improve the picture immensely, but I'll get to that in a moment. 

First, you'll find that it's difficult to use the otherwise attractive 

remote and onscreen interface, due to the abundance of so-called 

international symbols and some oddly labeled menu functions. While 

people in the European community might consider an arrow pointing into 

a box to be an icon for input selection, to this average lug-like 

reviewer, it might as well be an Egyptian hieroglyph. Even when you 

figure out what they do, most of the remote functions seem to be 

toggle controls. This means that a single button will cycle through 

various inputs, aspect-ratio options, or on and off commands, which 

makes it difficult to set up macro-based remote-control systems. 

According to Philips, the toggle controls contain all of the necessary 

discrete commands that you'd want, but you might need several NASA 

engineers or lots of trial and error to figure out how to dissect the 

IR stream. Fortunately, newer Philips Pronto Pro remotes come with 

discrete codes for this TV, and users of older Pronto models will 

eventually be able to download the codes from Philips' Website. If you 

use another similar remote, you might find it easier to cozy up to a 

friend who has a Pronto.  

 

The Cineos has reasonable contrast and produces an extremely bright 

image, assuming that you consider 100 foot-Lamberts to be bright. You 

should, since the average movie theater puts out about 10 to 11 ft-L 

on a really good day with a film running through the projector and the 

wind at its back. You could probably watch this TV out by the side of 

your pool in the middle of the afternoon, although I haven't tried it. 

(Just because I review TVs for a living doesn't mean I lounge around 

all of the time.) The picture might even look better with some lights 

on, as the black level is a bit high, which makes images look slightly 

washed out. The Cineos' picture looks no more washed out than those of 

many LCD displays, though, and it has a much tighter pixel structure 

than comparable-resolution LCD monitors. The latter feature gives the 

picture a smooth, realistic look (I hate to use the word filmlike, 

given how crappy film can look in the average theater).  

 

After I tuned the picture further, the Cineos had good color fidelity. 

The set has a reasonably good color decoder that lets you crank the 

color saturation without making images look cartoonish or faces look 

sunburned. With composite test signals, the decent comb filter helped 

sharpen the borders between colors. This effect was less apparent with 

regular video material, though. Before professional tweaking, the low 

color-temperature setting is the most accurate, and it was good enough 

for most of my viewing. In this setting, images are reasonably 

neutral; only the brightest and darkest images show a hint of blue 

tint. Of all of the errors to make, this is the most innocuous. (See 

the measurements box for post-calibration results.) Overall, the TV's 

color fidelity is good, and individual, fully saturated red, green, 

and blue images look vivid without seeming unnatural.  

 

The display's video processor is both its weakest and its strongest 

link. The processor is slow to pick up film-originated material's 3:2 

sequence, but it will do so eventually. While the resulting image 

lacks 3:2-based artifacts, it includes some new ones of its own. The 

most noticeable is a flickering of fine, diagonal details. This 

doesn't come up all of the time; when it does, however, it can be 

distracting. Then again, if you connect a progressive-scan DVD player 

or an external processor, the image will look outstanding. While most 

TVs still add some artifacts to the incoming progressive signal, the 

Cineos doesn't. On the flip side, the display includes Pixel Plus, 

Philip's proprietary motion-compensation algorithm that does a 

phenomenal job of eliminating motion jitter. Moving images have an 

incredible fluidity that makes film-based material look almost like 

original high-definition video. This may bother people who like the 

way film's altered frame rate (24 frames per second converted to 30 

frames per second) looks on a video display, but I think it's 

fantastic. I wish Philips would license this technology.  

 

My preproduction sample had a few other anomalies that I wouldn't 

expect to see in the final product. If they are there, though, you 

won't have any problem noticing them, as they're extremely obvious. 

For one, the image has a fixed-pattern video noise that includes a 

streak down the middle of the screen. If I didn't know better, I'd 

think the screen was scratched. The display also had more difficulty 

processing video-sourced 480i signals through the wideband (high-def) 

inputs than it did through the interlaced-only component connection.  

 

Overall, LCOS is an intriguing technology and is sure to give 

DLP-based displays a run for their money. It has a good base to work 

from in the Cineos 44PL977S, which also has a number of unique 

features coupled with a few distractions. You should definitely try it 

before you buy it. If nothing else, Pixel Plus tops the list of 

bonuses, providing a smooth, lifelike picture. In and of itself, Pixel 

Plus makes this set worth experiencing 

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