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A business monitor with a USB-C port, Windows Hello camera, KVM switch, LightSensor and PowerSensor. If you’ve heard this somewhere before, it was probably the Philips 34B1U5600 that we recently tested.This time, we’re focusing on the smaller, 27-inch variant, which is perhaps even more suited to the workplace environment than the curved widescreen. What makes the 27B1U5601 different besides the smaller diagonal?
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We tested the display properties using the Datacolor Spyder5Elite probe. The display has a 27-inch IPS panel with a classic 16:9 aspect ratio, 2560×1440 px resolution, anti-glare coating and uniform bezels on three sides. It also offers a slightly higher 75Hz refresh rate, but you won’t find Adaptive Sync here. Contrast reaches 1000:1, brightness is up to 350 nits and the 8-bit panel displays 16.7 million colours. Don’t look for HDR considering the lower brightness.
We compared the display quality in the basic mode, which is the mode the monitor will be in right out of the box. With our probe, we measured 100% sRGB, 81% AdobeRGB, 89% DCI-P3, and 80% NTSC coverage, which are slightly lower than the 34B1U5600 offered. Maximum brightness reached 346 nits in standard mode, and after switching the color profile to native, we measured exactly 350 nits, which is the value on paper. The uniformity tests confirmed what we saw with the colour display, namely that the monitor is definitely one of the better ones in this area. The average Delta E color deviation is also excellent, with a value of 0.81, which is a hair better than the 0.82 of its larger sibling.
The gamma modes were found to be somewhat inaccurate, having a deviation of 0.1 for the 1.8 and 2.0 modes. From 2.2 onwards, however, the deviation increased to 0.2, practically making the lower mode the higher one. This is something to watch out for if you need a particular value at work.
Input Lag and Response Time
We also measured the input lag on the monitor in several Smart Response modes.
SmartResponse already offers a fairly solid 10.9 ms base, which is reduced to a minimum of 9.8 ms, which is a good improvement considering how low the values we’re talking about are.
On the manufacturer’s website you will find information about 4 ms response time in GTG. The off, fast and faster modes proved to be usable, on the other hand the fastest mode suffers from inverse ghosting and I do not recommend using it at all.
