Philips 27E1N1100A review: Modern design, low price and legacy connectivity

Philips’s new 1100-series monitors are aimed firmly at the general-purpose office or home-office user who wants something affordable, reliable and practical. Available in 24in and 27in guises as the Philips 24E1N1100A and Philips 27E1N1100A, both are equipped with FHD IPS panels with narrow borders to better support multi-monitor setups.

They also have an eye on users who may not be working with the latest kit because they offer VGA connectivity, a feature not often seen on modern monitors but of value to anyone who is using a desktop PC that’s a little long in the tooth.

Philips 27E1N1100A review: What do you get for your money?

For just over £100 you can’t expect a 27in monitor with either bells or whistles, let alone both. That said, the 27E1N1100A isn’t wholly shorn of features and has quite a few more than I was expecting given the price and target audience.

Design-wise, the 27E1N1100A is a basic black plastic affair with very little in the way of design fripperies. It’s smart and solid, however, and quite light for a 27in monitor at 4kg.

Philips has got one of the key basics right with impressively narrow bezels of around 8mm on all four sides, so you can place multiple displays adjacent to each other with minimum dead space between them.

The stand is a simple two-piece affair consisting of a solid 210mm square base and a short pillar with a hole in it to keep your cables grounded together. Adjustability is limited to tilt between -5 and 20 degrees. If you want more than that you’ll have to cough up for a VESA stand or desk arm and take advantage of the 100 x 100mm VESA screws on the back of the cabinet.

The I/O port selection is unusual for a modern monitor. Philips has omitted DisplayPort in favour of VGA and 3.5mm audio inputs to support users who are using a desktop PC that has fallen behind the times. There’s also an HDMI 1.4 input and a 3.5mm audio output. 

Inside the cabinet are two 2W speakers. With a maximum volume of 72.7dBA measured against a pink noise source at 1m they are not the loudest around. The sound they produce is rather muddy and confined too, and devoid of anything you could describe as bass no matter how generous you were being. 

Of course, monitor speakers at the bottom end of the market are always pretty horrible, but the ones fitted to the 27E1N1100A don’t distort now matter how high you turn them up. They’re at least good enough to handle voice calls and the sound effects from games without making you wince.

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Philips 27E1N1100A review: How good is the image quality?

Pointing my trusty colourimeter at the 27E1N1100A, I recorded a peak brightness of 285cd/m2 and a contrast ratio of 1,300:1, both healthy numbers for a budget panel. Brightness uniformity was good too, with none of the 25 panels the test divides the screen into showing any serious levels of variation.

Measured gamut volumes turned in at 94% sRGB, 66.6% DCI-P3 and 64.7% AdobeRGB. Those numbers are not as high as those I got from BenQ’s budget 24-incher, the GW2490, but the difference is small and offset by the Phillips monitor’s higher brightness and contrast ratio.

Colour accuracy is acceptable for a monitor at this price, with a Delta E of 2.6 vs the sRGB profile (with the monitor in sRGB mode). A Delta E of below 3 is more than good enough for a monitor being pitched at general users, rather than anyone with a creative bent, as it means that any colour variation will be indistinguishable to the eye. 

There is an option in the menu setting to turn on adaptive synchronisation but the absence of a DisplayPort or HDMI 2.1 video input means you are restricted to AMD’s FreeSync system. To take advantage of Nvidia’s G-Sync technology, you would need one or the other of the aforementioned inputs.

Motion handling is good for a budget productivity monitor, a side effect of that 100Hz refresh rate. There is still a fair amount of ghosting and some blurring to be seen in test circumstances, but the latter can be brought under control using the 20-position MPRT (Moving Picture Response Time) adjuster. However, the higher you set this, the lower the brightness drops. 

The 27E1N1100A has a dedicated Game Setting menu, which isn’t something I expected to find. This allows you to activate adaptive sync, manage the MPRT settings and activate the three-level SmartResponse feature (SmartResponse is Philips-speak for overdrive). Setting the MPRT to 10 and SmartResponse to Fast (Level 1) resulted in a surprisingly crisp and fluid gaming experience without reducing the brightness excessively.

For a budget monitor, the Philips 27E1N1100A has a surprisingly large number of options in the menu. For instance, under the Color menu you’ll find options to adjust the temperature, fix the panel to the sRGB profile or manually adjust the red, green and blue settings.

Navigate to the Picture-SmartImage menu and you can choose between EasyRead, Office, Photo, Movie, Game, Economy, LowBlue or Off. Apart from EasyRead, which puts the display into black and white, and LowBlue, which does what it says in an effort to reduce eye strain, these settings just seem to adjust the brightness and contrast levels. They certainly have no discernable or measurable impact on colour levels. 

This being a Philips monitor, the menu system is large, clear and intuitively laid out, while the small joystick that sits around the back of the cabinet on the right makes navigation a very straightforward affair.

Philips 27E1N1100A review: Should I buy it?

The Philips 27E1N1100A is a usefully competent bit of kit and eminently affordable at just over £100. The IPS panel is as bright and colourful as you have any right to expect given the price and you won’t get a higher refresh rate than 100Hz for this sort of money, though that’s only of use if you use the HDMI connector; the VGA output is limited to 60Hz.

The choice of I/O ports will divide potential customers. If you want DisplayPort, the 27E1N1100A is not for you, but for anyone wanting a modern monitor with a legacy VGA input, it’s just the ticket. I’ve no idea how many boxes with VGA video output are out there in the wild, but presumably, it’s enough for Philips to think it worthwhile making a monitor to cater for that demand.

The 27E1N1100A is surprisingly competent for casual gaming too, though the absence of a DisplayPort input limits the usefulness of the adaptive sync facility unless you happen to be running an AMD GPU. Overall then, the 27E1N1100A is a very nice package for the asking price.