We knew it was coming in June but now we now exactly when you can fork out for the Philips Cinema 21:9 TV. 18th June is the date to jam in your diaries and you’d better put in some serious overtime because you’ll need a rather icy cool £4,500 to get one in the UK. The good news is that we do have the full details on the dream machine so you can at least drool if not afford.

It runs a full 2560x1080p HD resolution making for a grand total of 8.3 million pixels, each controlled by the Philips Perfect Pixel HD engine. It offers a 200Hz frame rate – as well it should – response times of just under 1ms and a contrast ratio of 80,000:1. Oh, and before we have a bunch of nay-sayers jumping in, there’s some smart tech to resize your 16:9 pictures without significantly distorting the images or leaving black bars all over the place.

The 17bit colour processing makes 2250 trillion different shades – prove them wrong if you’ve got a year or two spare – and the old faithful Philips Ambilight Spectra 3 system will chuck out the appropriate hues against the wall, by which it sits, for a more dynamic experience.

There’s five HDMI ports to play with as well as USB connectivity and it’ll play back ACC, MP3, AC3, LPCM, WMA, JPEG, GIF, PNG, MPEG1, MPEG2 and MPEG4 which is everything you’d hope for with only a few exceptions in the shape of FLAC and DivX. Best, though, it’s fully webbed up with Philips’ NetTV system which will allow full internet browsing as well as all your widgetry.

Soundwise, there’s an integrated 15W system of two backward facing subwoofers and a set of face-on high-enders but I’d be amazed if anyone who shells out four and half big ones is going to stop short of a full AV set up.

If you buy sooner rather than later, Philips will throw in a swivel stand and “smart level” bracket trinket but, if you’re seriously after one of these things, I’d wait. Wait because this is just the kind of kit that you’ll see for considerably less once the fuss dies down – particularly as the first quote we had was 4,000€. I know the pound has been bad, but not that bad.

Philips