Philips 272S4LPJCB review

The Philips 272S4LPJCB is expensive, but you can feel exactly why as soon as you lift it from the box. The most striking thing about this monitor is its high quality-looking matt grey finish. This minimises reflections and also doesn’t pick up smudges or dust particularly easily. The crease on the thick bottom bezel adds a hint of design flair, as does the subtle status light and the curved speaker grille.

What’s more, the silver stand’s highlights and lightly textured rear panel make this a stylish monitor from both the front and the back. There’s a large cable routing hole at the rear, too, helping to keep pesky wires under control.

You also get all the physical adjustment options you could wish for. There’s 12cm of height adjustment, taking the screen from just a few centimetres off the desk to a good height for those with higher seating positions. The stand also has a smooth turntable for rotating the screen, and there’s plenty of tilt adjustment, too.

Default image quality is fine, although for the money you might expect a little more. This is an expensive monitor, and you only get a TN panel instead of the IPS or VA you’d expect at this price. Actual performance is perfectly good, though. 99.6% of the sRGB colour gamut is covered out of the box, while black levels of 0.31cd/m2 (at a maximum brightness setting of 304cd/m2) mean dark greys and blacks are reasonably well served in photos and videos.

The screen has reasonable colour accuracy, although it’s a little lower than we’d have liked for such an expensive monitor. We measured an average delta-E of 2.64, which was largely caused by greys that were a little off the mark and oversaturated reds.

When using the monitor for everyday tasks such as web browsing, email and document editing, we had few problems with the monitor’s performance. Viewing angles were fine when looking at the monitor straight on and even moving around to the side of the screen produced only a slight shadow effect on the image. The monitor also has built-in speakers; a pair of 2W models. They’re fine for speech and watching the occasional video clip, but that’s about it. You’ll want speakers or headphones, and Philips has placed a 3.5mm audio jack on the bottom of the monitor. Most monitors have their 3.5mm jack on the back, which is far less convenient.

You get all the display inputs you’d expect from a professional monitor, with DisplayPort, HDMI, DVI and VGA. There’s also a 3.5mm audio input for when you’re using DVI or VGA, which don’t carry audio signals. We were a little surprised to find no USB ports on this monitor, which is something we’d expect on a screen costing over £300.

There are plenty of extra features available via the onscreen menus, including a power-saving tool called Power Sensor. This uses two sensors on the front of the monitor that detect the distance between it and whatever is sitting directly in front of it. If the distance goes above a certain point – such as if you get up from your desk – the monitor will dim to 20% brightness to save power, only to light back up again when you return. There are four sensitivity modes to choose from; you have to be practically next to your monitor to wake it up on setting 1, while setting 4 is less precious but still not as sensitive as we’d have liked.

There’s also a picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture mode, which lets you see video from two sources at a time. This will occasionally be useful when you need to have two devices connected but only have one screen.

The Philips 272S4LPJCB is a stylish business monitor with a few handy features and comprehensive adjustment options, but it’s eye-wateringly expensive for a monitor with a TN panel. Its image quality is practically identical to the far cheaper AOC Q2778VQE, too, which makes it a hard sell despite its many qualities.