Philips 298P4QJEB/00 review

The Philips Brilliance 298P4QJEB/00 is an ultra-wide 29in IPS monitor with an extra large 2,560×1,080 resolution. Its large, bulky base and bezel aren’t quite as stylish as other 29in monitors we’ve seen, but it’s height-adjustable and its rotating stand is much more versatile. The screen can reach up to 210mm from your desk and swivel side to side by up to 65 degrees, so it’s very easy to find a comfortable working angle.

The monitor has a 21:9 aspect ratio, so it’s perfect for watching films without any black bars appearing on either side of the picture. It’s great for multitasking in the office, too, as there’s enough space to have multiple windows on the screen simultaneously and Philips’ bundled SmartControl software makes it very easy to arrange them in different configurations. The program won’t automatically snap them in place, which is a shame, but you can either drag each window to the appropriate partition or use a small monitor icon that appears in the corner of each window to move them for you. We found this icon only appears on certain windows, though, such as web browsers and email clients, as it didn’t appear when we opened up Microsoft Word. We had to move the window manually in this case, but both methods are very easy to use and we didn’t have any other problems when rearranging our desktop.

The 298P4QJEB/00 is also the first 29in monitor we’ve seen that can rotate to portrait mode. In this mode, there’s enough room to fit two pages of a Microsoft Word document on screen, with one page appearing above the other, which makes it perfect for editing long text files. Conveniently, you can enable the auto-rotate feature in the SmartControl menu so that the screen automatically detects when it’s in portrait mode.

That’s 2.560 vertical pixels, which is a lot of webpage or spreadsheet on a single screen

It’s great to have portrait mode as an option, but we found the monitor was a little too tall to look at comfortably for long periods of time, and much preferred to organise multiple documents in horizontal mode.

The monitor’s overall image quality was excellent. Our colour calibrator revealed it was already showing 98 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut at its default settings. Its only area of weakness was its purple coverage, but we managed to reclaim this once we’d calibrated it, increasing its overall colour accuracy to an even more impressive 99.2 per cent. This is outstanding for an IPS display.

The 298P4QJEB/00 had excellent gamut coverage before calibration …

… and colour accuracy increased to a near-perfect 99.2 per cent after calibration

We were equally impressed with our subjective image tests. The screen has a matt finish, and matt finishes can sometimes make colours appear less vibrant on some displays, but our solid reds, greens and blues were bright and vivid while whites were bright and uniformly lit across the screen. Blacks were very deep as well, reflecting our low black level reading of 0.32cd/m2, and its viewing angles are superb. We had to be viewing it from the side before we noticed a darkening of the screen, but even then we could still see what was on screen very clearly.

The monitor’s high contrast levels also make images look great. We measured a contrast ratio of 846:1 before calibration and saw a very high level of detail in all our test photos. It couldn’t quite match Dell’s U2913WM when it came to darker shadow detail, though, as these areas were simply black on the Philips when we looked at both monitors side by side. It’s a relatively small complaint, though, and you’d only notice the difference if you were using the monitor for fine photo editing.

The 298P4QJEB/00 has an extensive range of ports for a monitor at this price. It has two HDMI inputs, an HDCP-compatible dual-link DVI-D input, one DisplayPort input, a 3.5mm audio line in and a headphone jack in addition to a four-port USB3 hub. There’s also a DisplayPort output for daisy-chaining other monitors and an integrated pair of speakers. The speakers are only good for listening to high and mid-range sources, such as news clips on the BBC News website or Windows’ alerts, but it’s much better to have them than not have them.

The Philips 298P4QJEB/00 is one of the best 29in monitors we’ve tested so far. We appreciate the ability to put it in portrait mode, even though we don’t love the feature, and the monitor a great array of connection ports. It doesn’t quite topple the Dell U2913WM, but if you’re looking to save £50 then this is an excellent alternative.