Philips Magnavox PR0930X 9" TV
An Adequate to Mediocre Kitchen TV Fairly Priced
I bought a refurbished unit, but it looked new to me.  Five minutes after hooking up to the cable, we had an extremely bright, sharp picture -- so bright and sharp that it almost hurt the eyes.  It has a control to automatically search for all the tunable (cable) channels.  Forty-five minutes later, while I was making supper, there was a small explosive sound and the picture was all fuzzy and washed out.<br />I was hopping mad and ready to send it back, but I let it run all night to see what would happen.  It looked the same the next morning, so I used the controls to dial a perfectly adequate picture.<br />I think what happened was that it was factory-set for an extremely high color temperature, say 9000°+, but the tube couldn't hold that.   BTW it has a normal range of picture tuning controls that you access through the remote.  Also, I don't like the high-color temperature setting so many TVs come with now -- nor do I like the excessive red bias that many models have as their default color.<br />Now it looks like a fairly normal picture -- not nearly as bright and sharp as it was initially, but perfectly adequate for a kitchen TV.  It's been used every day for the past five weeks and it's OK -- not great, but not bad -- a perfectly average, or maybe even mediocre but functional, screen.  Its not as sharp as the 14 year old GE five inch set it replaces (small text is extremely fuzzy), but the color fidelity and contrast are better.<br />The sound is average too -- monophonic coming out of the right side of the set.  The FM radio works just fine but it's a nuisance to dial stations if you like to hop around.  The frequency of the station to which you are listening is shown on the screen constantly, but it hops up and down every few seconds or so to avoid burning the screen -- I don't know if that's necessary nowadays, and its slightly annoying to look at -- but why would anyone stare at an otherwise blank screen?<br />The [$$$] I paid for the set is just about right -- it's that kind of set, not great, not bad.  I'm thinking about getting another one.<br />Dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking