Philips Brilliance 242G5DJEB/00 review

The Philips Brilliance 242G5DJEB/00 has clearly been built with gaming in mind. It has several special gaming picture modes, including First-Person Shooter, Racing, Real-Time Strategy and two Gamer profiles.

We preferred not to use these modes as all of their default settings made the screen look blue and harsh, but we were pleased that all of them can be customised to your liking using the brightness, contrast, sharpness and colour temperature settings. This isn’t always the case with pre-defined picture modes, so we were happy that the Brilliance 242G5DJEB/00 let us do it.

The monitor also comes with the Smart Keypad, a small mouse-shaped menu controller that connects via mini USB. The Smart Keypad lets you change image settings without having to reach for the bezel-mounted menu buttons. We weren’t too enamoured by the feel of the Smart Keypad’s buttons, but it is nonetheless a handy device to have.

The Philips Brilliance 242G5DJEB/00 is an excellent gaming monitor, but our main concern is the price. At just under £290, it’s more expensive than the AOC myUltraSpeed G2460Pqu and the larger Iiyama Prolite GB2773HS, both of which have 144Hz refresh rates. The Philips has a lot going for it, though, as it has more connection ports than the Iiyama and has better image quality than the AOC. The Brilliance 242G5DJEB/00’s mediocre colour accuracy just holds it back from receiving five stars, but it’s well worth the extra expense if you value connectivity.