Philips 27E1N1600AE review: This 27in monitor means business | Expert Reviews

Philips 27E1N1600AE review: How good is the image quality?

While some of us are confident enough to tinker liberally with the on-screen display, it’s always nice to find a monitor that arrives with sensible settings straight from the factory. Philips has done exactly that here, with an out-of-the-box performance that means most users won’t need to delve into the OSD at all. At default settings, brightness reached a sensible 215cd/m2, and while this is a tad high for sensibly lit office environments (we’d recommend around 120cd/m2 to 140cd/m2 as a baseline), it’s a sensible level for brighter rooms in the home.

Colour accuracy won’t worry pricier monitors, but there’s little to complain about here. Measured against the standard sRGB colour gamut, the Philips’ default settings provide a very respectable average Delta E of 1.38 and maximum deviation of 3.95. There are peaks in the blue and yellow tones and a slightly wayward colour temperature – the measured 6,200k gives noticeably warmer, more reddish whites than the ideal 6,500k – but images and skin tones look mostly natural and believable. It’s only once you either calibrate the Philips or put it next to a more colour-accurate display, that you might notice the variation in colours.

The decision to use an IPS panel means that contrast lags behind comparably priced monitors with VA (or OLED) panels, but a measured contrast ratio of 1,598:1 is actually pretty good by IPS standards. It’s only once the lights go down that you’ll begin to hanker for a deeper black level, and even then the combination of good colour accuracy and reasonable contrast means you’re unlikely to be disappointed.

Perhaps more important for work use is that Philips’ anti-glare coating works well. It did a great job of diffusing reflections, even under bright spotlights or sunlight streaming through our home office’s skylights. Horizontal viewing angles are nice and wide, too, so you shouldn’t miss the stand’s lack of side-to-side swivel too much.

If you’re tempted to tinker with the various preset picture modes in the on-screen display, I’d advise against it. The Economy mode reduces brightness to 136cd/m² and doesn’t impact upon colour accuracy or contrast, but you could get the same effect by manually lowering the brightness. One thing worth mentioning, however, is that the Movie and Games modes both enable dynamic contrast, which I recommend disabling at all times, while the Movie mode inexplicably bumps the colour temperature to 7500k, boosting brightness at the expense of colour accuracy. The Photos mode is baffling, too, as it simply bumps the brightness right up to the monitor’s eye-searing 354cd/m2 maximum while doing nothing to improve colour accuracy.

The 27E1N1600AE’s panel covers the entirety of the sRGB gamut and stretches beyond to cover 82.2% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, too, but that’s not enough to be useful for colour-critical work. Measured against the wider P3 colour gamut, the Philips’ average Delta E increases to 1.99, which is acceptable, but the maximum leaps up to 5.44 and several green and yellow tones peak well over a Delta E of 3, which indicates that you’re not seeing certain colours as they’re meant to look. Again, that’s fine for casual use, and you will see a wider range of colour in DCI-P3 than sRGB, but you won’t be able to rely on what you see on screen for photo or video editing purposes.

The quality of the backlighting is adequate. I measured brightness and contrast across 25 areas on the screen and found that it was 12% dimmer on the far right corner, and you can find similar drops in brightness across the upper and right-hand side portions of the screen. There is a little backlight leakage in these areas, too, but nothing egregious. I’ve seen monitors at twice the price which are noticeably worse.

Motion performance is actually quite respectable for a monitor that’s more focused on productivity than gaming. The 100Hz refresh rate is a real boon, too, as it makes for noticeably smoother scrolling up and down documents, and the monitor supports basic adaptive synchronisation for tear-free performance in games. It only supports AMD Freesync, though.

At default settings, the panel’s claimed 4ms response time seems a tad optimistic. Quickly scrolling through documents caused lots of doubling up of text, and there was noticeable smearing in faster-moving games. A quick delve into the OSD quickly rectifies matters, however. If you want to leave adaptive sync enabled then I’d recommend setting the QuickResponse mode to the middle ‘Faster’ setting as this cleans up motion without introducing any inverse ghosting or unwanted nasties. Turn off adaptive sync, however, and the MPRT mode does an equally great job of improving motion clarity at medium to high settings, even if it does progressively reduce peak brightness.

The 27E1N1600AE does also support HDR, but the panel and backlighting just aren’t good enough to warrant enabling it. The combination of modest peak brightness (354cd/m2), a sub 2,000:1 contrast ratio and no local dimming means that this monitor simply isn’t capable of doing justice to HDR content. If you prefer the look of a game with HDR enabled, then it’s an option, but I’d personally stick to SDR.