How much????
I got my 47" Ambilight for £800 a few months ago - hunt around and you'll get a bargain.
Ambilight, the curious multi-coloured backlighting effect exclusive to Philips, is a remarkable thing. It doesn’t suit every programme – do you really want splashes of colour on the wall around the TV when you’re watching sombre announcements on the news? – but for entertainment it is an impressive, immersive addition. Philips …
I owned one of the early Ambilight LCDs and it really does enhance the experience; unfortunately it was broken during a house move, and despite the insurance money, its simply impossible to justify the price premium; you can get an excellent 1080p Bravia for half that money.
Seems a lot for pretty flashing lights to me....
There is also the argument that if you pay that much for a telly, it should not need to have the picture tweaked to get it "just right". I don't go to the cinema and demand to be able to adjust the colour balance - I expect it to be right. Same should apply to a decent telly.
I can't help feeling that people who mess around with the picture to get it "just right" are more interested in looking at the picture, rather than the movie. Bit like hi-fi buffs who listen to the sound, rather than the music.
But how can they justify the £1300 price tag, for a 32" TV? That's about 4x the going rate for a 32" 1080p LED as far as I can tell. Unless I'm missing something here, you're paying a grand for a 'mood lighting' feature that you'll probably get bored of and turn off pretty quickly?
A friend of mine bought a 32" Ambilight TV less than four years ago at a little more than £1300. The power board packed up at the beginning of this year, and Phillips no longer supply the spare part. Their proposal when challenged was to pay £250 if the TV was returned to them.
For this sort of money, I'd expect a TV to remain supported by a spares and repair service for a lot longer than three years. Writing off a thousand pounds over that period is too rich for my blood.
Almost any kind of audio visual device coming off the production line is going to be set up with 'factory default settings', which ensures that the product performs as advertised when switched on. However, that can't account for the many and varied ways in which people like to use the equipment, let alone account for the variation in ambient location.
Hence adjustments to improve the user experience...,