Philips 498P9 Brilliance review: Two high-performance QHD displays in one SuperWide 32:9 monitor Review

The Philips 498P9 Brilliance is a SuperWide curved Lcd with a forty nine-inch (124cm) diagonal and 32:nine component ratio that can replace a dual screen established-up. It offers the equivalent of two 27-inch QHD (2,560 x 1,440) displays side by side. You can screen the movie from two PCs and flip a one keyboard and mouse again and forth amongst the PCs employing the built-in KVM change.

Finished in a textured black, the styling of the 498P9 is unobtrusively minimal and the only seen branding is a tiny PHILIPS symbol in the the centre of the bottom edge and ‘Brilliance 489P’ on the reduced remaining corner.

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Broad-screen watch: the forty nine-inch Philips 498P9 Brilliance, which has a native resolution of five,a hundred and twenty by 1,440 pixels, costs £749.


Illustrations or photos: Philips

Consumer controls

Consumer regulate is via the standard row of buttons, hidden less than the edge of the enclosure around the bottom correct corner. The fifth button, very last on the correct, is the electrical power ON/OFF button. With the screen turned off from this button the 498P9 is still consuming roughly .three Watts. There is a real electrical power ON/OFF rocker change located following to the IEC electrical power socket. When on and in normal operation the 498P9 commonly consumes seventy seven.2W and has a ‘B’ strength rating. Our measurements present .3W and 63W for the critique sample. Two regular 27-inch QHD displays with an ‘A’ strength rating might consume 50W to 55W merged.

The other four buttons are context related, dual-function buttons. The 1st is the SmartImage hot critical: repeated presses cycle through the 8 SmartImage options, with a ninth solution to change SmartImage off. With the OSD (on-screen screen) menu picked this gets a return-to-past-menu-amount button. The second button selects for sign input and the third is a customisable user function button. With the OSD exhibited, these two buttons are up/down menu navigation buttons. The fourth button both opens the OSD or, with the menu open up, confirms a choice.

The user manual mentions a handheld distant, but this is only offered in China.

Audio

A built-in 5W stereo electrical power amplifier drives two interior loudspeakers with downward facing grilles located together the bottom of the screen enclosure. Audio input is via the HDMI or DisplayPort connections.

Automatic impression optimisation

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Like lots of Philips screen solutions in the very last few years, the electronics driving the screen on the 498P9 features the automatic impression optimisation functions SmartImage and SmartContrast. For equally of these functions, the incoming movie sign is analysed and dynamic adjustments are designed to the screen parameters. Both equally can be turned off, if demanded, via the OSD.

SmartImage dynamically adjusts distinction, color saturation and sharpness in accordance to a selected written content kind. It provides a alternative of Movie, Game, Economic climate, LowBlue mode and SmartUniformity.

SmartContrast dynamically adjusts the brightness of the backlight to offer optimum impression distinction. It can also help to cut down electrical power consumption.

Display screen technologies

The 498P9 has a forty eight.8-inch diagonal (124cm) Vertical Alignment Lcd panel with a 1800R curvature (a 1.8-metre radius). The native resolution is five,a hundred and twenty by 1,440 pixels with a pixel pitch of .233 by .233mm.

Colour gamut is specified as 121{fb741301fcc9e6a089210a2d6dd4da375f6d1577f4d7524c5633222b81dec1ca} of sRGB, 103{fb741301fcc9e6a089210a2d6dd4da375f6d1577f4d7524c5633222b81dec1ca} of NTSC and ninety one{fb741301fcc9e6a089210a2d6dd4da375f6d1577f4d7524c5633222b81dec1ca} of Adobe RGB. Which is great for a W-LED backlit VA Lcd. Displays with quantum dot backlights can do greater, however: a single of the few Philips monitors to employ a quantum dot backlight, the 436M6, provides a gamut of 145{fb741301fcc9e6a089210a2d6dd4da375f6d1577f4d7524c5633222b81dec1ca} of Adobe RGB.

The color gamut for this screen is noticeably greater than would normally be predicted for a classic VA-Lcd panel. Fairly than use a quantum dot backlight to increase color gamut, Philips has made use of a technologies it calls Ultra Broad-Coloration. This achieves an enhancement in gamut by tweaking the chemistry of the backlight LEDs and the transmission characteristics of the color filters in the Lcd panel for a greater response match.

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Spectrogram of the regular backlight W-LED displaying that, although the blue spike from the LED is a great match for the blue Lcd filter transmission curve, the relaxation of the output is not as great a match for the green or pink filters. Common filter responses are shown as dotted traces.   


Terry Relph-Knight / ZDNet  

W-LEDs commonly made use of in screen backlights are seen blue LEDs with a yellow phosphor, and although their mild seems ‘white’ to the human visual technique, it isn’t really a specifically pure ‘white’. This is normally not a great match to the response of the R,G and B color filters in an Lcd panel, which boundaries gamut.

Each and every 498P9 is equipped from the factory with a calibration chart. Brightness and color uniformity are measured at twenty five points throughout the screen. Relative to the centre point, measurements ought to be amongst 97{fb741301fcc9e6a089210a2d6dd4da375f6d1577f4d7524c5633222b81dec1ca} and 102{fb741301fcc9e6a089210a2d6dd4da375f6d1577f4d7524c5633222b81dec1ca} for brightness uniformity and significantly less than 2 for typical Delta E.

Connections

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This diagram of the 489P9 I/O connections is from the user manual.  


Impression: Philips  

All connections to the Philips 498P9 are downward facing together the prime of a recess that runs together the again of the screen, above the reduced edge. Viewed from the again, the three pin IEC socket for the electrical power direct is positioned at the remaining end of the recess, together with a mechanical electrical power on/off rocker change. The I/O connections are grouped at the correct end. The movie connections consist of two HDMI connections 1 and 2 which are HDMI 2. compliant and a single DisplayPort relationship which is DP1.4.

A built-in USB three.2 hub is incorporated which has two upstream connections and four downstream. A single of the downstream connections supports BC 1.2 quick demand. A three.5mm jack socket caters for headphone relationship. 

The USB hub supports Keyboard Online video & Mouse (KVM) switching for use when the screen is linked to two PCs (essentially it’s keyboard and mouse switching). Switching is attained both through the OSD menu, or the Consumer Functionality button — the third of the 5 user controls — can be assigned as a KVM toggle. Despite the fact that Philips claims in the literature for the 498P9 “A convenient button allows you to quickly change amongst resources,” there is no trace of a focused KVM button on our critique observe.

Included equipment

Included with the 498P9 are an IEC mains cable, a DisplayPort cable, an HDMI cable, a Quick Start out leaflet, the calibration sheet and a user manual on CD.  

Conclusions

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Impression: Philips

The 498P9 is a neat all-in-a single answer for users who would normally want to use two huge Quad Hd displays. The use of a SuperWide panel assures impression uniformity and color harmony, which is typically a lot more complicated to reach with two independent monitors.
 
In use, although it can be operated as a complete-width five,a hundred and twenty-by-1,440 screen, it would make minimal sense to do so for general computing tasks. At complete width, although regulate menus continue to be together the edges of the screen, pop-up regulate panels, internet internet pages, or text documents the natural way look in a slender strip a single quarter of the screen width, down the centre of the screen. Location document zoom to web page width utilises the full width of the screen, but vertically only displays a strip of perhaps ten sentences. Entire-screen YouTube movie occupies the centre 50 percent of the screen.

The Ultra Broad-Coloration gamut-boosting technologies, together with Philips wise impression processing, does handle to extract extremely great impression quality from the VA Lcd panel in the 498P9.

The built in audio lacks bass but is normally of fair quality and is surely convenient, although the built-in KVM is crippled by the absence of the promised ‘convenient button’. Ideally this would be an external button on a traveling cable that could be positioned around a keyboard and mouse.

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