Philips 42PF7320A 42-Inch Widescreen Plasma HDTV
Excellent video quality, some bothersome design flaws
I bought this plasma TV on Dec 21, 2005.  I am an electrical engineer with over 40 years of experience in industrial and consumer electronic equipment. I find that this TV set has a beautiful image rendition. Colors are superb and has a lot of automatic image tuning features. But, on the other hand, it also suffers from a series of design flaws that I think only an experienced techincal person can stand. For starters the closed captions circuit becomes \\"disconnected\\" from the channel you are viewing and the only way of getting them back is by turning the set off and on again. Once they are working it will not bother you again until you turn the set off for the night. The next time you use the set you may again need to do the \\"off/on\\" routine.  Also, although less frequent, you will get a picture without sound. Again the \\"off/on\\" routine will save the day. This affect all inputs.  Technically speaking this is due to the TV set \\"control software\\" (which is user-upgradable) not being able to \\"soft-connect\\" all the required circuits (C.C., sound, OSD, etc..) correctly. Turning the set off and on will \\"reboot\\" this software.  So, because I know what is going on and because some day Philips might fix all of this thru a software upgrade, I have decided to co-exist peacefully with it.    THIS IS AN UPDATE - SEPT 2008. So far this set have required four visits from the Sears serviceman. First, the plasma screen driver for the upper half failed. Repaired under the service contract. Second, when changing A/V inputs it took about 90 seconds for the change to be completed. Again repaired under the service contract.Third, Now the screen lower half driver failed. Again repaired under the service contract. Fourth, the screen failed altogether. Sears replaced all the insides of the set (including the screen itself) except for the A/V board.  The strange thing is that all this happened in a SIX MONTH period.  In conclusion and trying to be non-technical, this TV set is pure trash. Apparently it burns itself to death due to a poor ventilation design. Right now is working, probably because I removed the rear cover and left the electronics exposed. A friend of mine who bought one too (because I recommended it at the beginning, I regret to say) throw it in the trash because it blew the screen too and he didn't had a service contract. It was 25 month old and he only used it for an average of 2 hours a day because he travels a lot.