As wide as it gets
Over the last year I’ve started to see more Ultra-Wide displays making their way into stores, and the latest of these boundary-benders is this behemoth from Philips. Measuring 34 inches across, it’s a desk-spanning beast that should offer gamers an immersive retina-filling experience. Let’s take a look to see if this display can overcome some of the limitations I found with earlier Ultra-Wide displays.
The included stand is excellent, with height, swivel, tilt and rotation all offered. The wide range of vertical motion allows for perfect height adjustment, and it also rotates through 90 degrees, just in case you want an incredibly long vertical display. The screen’s bezel is extremely thin, at just 2.5mm, although the screen doesn’t quite reach it, with a 9mm border between the edge of the display and the bezel. The on-screen display is accessed via a series of buttons on the bottom left – touch controls would have been a nice feature at this price. There’s a wide range of colour adjustment options, including individual hue and saturation for each colour.
Input options are comprehensive, with video fed into the display via VGA, DVI-Dual Link, Display Port (1.1 and 1.2) and the new MHL-HDMI standard. This is designed for mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. I tested the display using a DisplayPort cable, and like most monitors with such a port the screen defaults to DisplayPort 1.1, limiting it to just 30Hz. Heading into the display’s menu revealed the option to enable 1.2 mode, which enables a refresh rate of 60Hz. There’s also a couple of USB 3.0 ports for your highspeed external devices.
With its 21:9 aspect ratio, the screen packs a total of 3440 x 1440 pixels. The first thing I noticed when turning on the screen was how bright and even the backlight it. This is thanks to the AH-IPS panel, which helps to overcome the narrow field of view that plagues LCDs. Philips claims users can sit at angles of up to 178 degrees without significant colour shifting, and this is crucial for such a wide display. Older models would exhibit colour shifting at either end simply due to their width even with the user sitting dead centre, but the AH-IPS panel solves this problem entirely.
The display also passed all of our colour, contrast and uniformity tests with flying colours. No pun intended. However, there is one issue with this display that is of utmost importance to gamers – the pixel response time. Philips clocks this at 14ms, dropping to 5ms when the Smart Response feature is enabled. To test this in action I fired up one of the fastest paced games around – Quake Live. There was a slight amount of motion blur, but nowhere near as bad as expected, solving another issue earlier Ultra-Wide displays had.
With the problems of the past now solved, I’m happy to recommend this screen to those who want a display that will fill their field of view. Just be aware that you’ll need some serious GPU horsepower to push around so many pixels. BENNETT RING
VERDICT
With this display Philips has resolved the major issues that prevented Ultra-Wide screens from being a gamer’s best friend.