Philips 27E1N1600AE review: This 27in monitor means business

If your priorities don’t push you immediately towards monitors with triple-figure refresh rates and the highest possible HDR certifications, then you’re probably looking for something a little more sensible. Philips’ E1 Series offers exactly that: this family of work-friendly monitors prioritises good image quality and useful features for sensible money.

We recently gave a 5-star review to the affordable Philips 27E1N1100A (£109), a 27in monitor with basic features and a Full HD IPS panel, but now it’s the turn of the slightly more upmarket 27E1N1600AE.

This 27-inch model boosts the resolution to 1440p, adds an adjustable stand and includes USB-C connectivity for single cable data and device charging simplicity. For a penny less than £200, the Philips 27E1N1600AE is a near-perfect pick for both the home and the home office.

Philips 27E1N1600AE review: What do you get for the money?

The Philips 27E1N1600AE gets off to a good start from the moment you open the box, with both the panel and the adjustable stand feeling reassuringly solid. There is a little assembly required. You have to secure the stand to the VESA 100mm x 100mm mount at the rear with four screws (a multi-tool is supplied in the box), while a small captive thumbscrew fastens the base to the stand, but this all only takes a minute or so.

With that job done, the stand provides 100mm of smooth-feeling height adjustment, and it’s easy to adjust both height and front-to-back tilt single-handedly without the monitor rocking back and forth. The only things lacking are side-to-side swivel and a pivot mode for portrait orientation, although neither will be missed by most users.

You get a decent selection of cables in the box, too, which is a pleasant surprise. Philips has included a 1.5m HDMI cable, a 1.8m USB-C cable and our review sample included a pair of UK and EU power cables. It’s particularly great to find a sensible length of USB-C cable in the box – I’ve seen monitors at twice the price with shorter USB-C cables that can prove awkward in regular use.

It’s no surprise that there’s no garish RGB lighting or OTT styling, but the 27E1N1600AE looks rather stylish for an office monitor. The squared-off base to the stand has a cutout in the middle – which proved genuinely useful for storing small items such as thumb drives, pens and paperclips – and the squared-off edges of the stand contrast nicely with the panel’s curves. There’s no fake brushed metal here, just clean lines, understated matte black and a subtle pinprick pattern stretching across the monitor’s rear.

Connectivity is modest, but the big attraction here is USB-C. Combine the Philips with a compatible laptop, and you’ll be able to send a 2,560 x 1,440 100Hz signal to the monitor while taking advantage of 65W of power delivery the other way. The only other video input on the monitor is a HDMI 1.4 socket, but you do get a pair of USB-A ports at the rear, both of which are rated to provide USB 3.2 Gen 1 transfer speeds (5Gbits/sec). One of those ports also has a USB-BC (Battery Charging) 1.2 specification for charging mobile devices at up to 15W.

Talking of power, the Philips’ power button doubles as a four-way joystick for controlling the on-screen display. The somewhat quirky combination of directional movements and button presses isn’t immediately logical – it took me a while to stop exiting the menu by mistake – but it’s not unusable. Thankfully, the onscreen display is clearly legible and sensibly laid out, and the average user probably won’t need to delve into it after they’ve set the brightness and motion settings to their preferences.

Philips 27E1N1600AE review: How good is the image quality?

While some of us are confident enough to tinker liberally with the on-screen display, it’s always nice to find a monitor that arrives with sensible settings straight from the factory. Philips has done exactly that here, with an out-of-the-box performance that means most users won’t need to delve into the OSD at all. At default settings, brightness reached a sensible 215cd/m2, and while this is a tad high for sensibly lit office environments (we’d recommend around 120cd/m2 to 140cd/m2 as a baseline), it’s a sensible level for brighter rooms in the home.

Colour accuracy won’t worry pricier monitors, but there’s little to complain about here. Measured against the standard sRGB colour gamut, the Philips’ default settings provide a very respectable average Delta E of 1.38 and maximum deviation of 3.95. There are peaks in the blue and yellow tones and a slightly wayward colour temperature – the measured 6,200k gives noticeably warmer, more reddish whites than the ideal 6,500k – but images and skin tones look mostly natural and believable. It’s only once you either calibrate the Philips or put it next to a more colour-accurate display, that you might notice the variation in colours.

The decision to use an IPS panel means that contrast lags behind comparably priced monitors with VA (or OLED) panels, but a measured contrast ratio of 1,598:1 is actually pretty good by IPS standards. It’s only once the lights go down that you’ll begin to hanker for a deeper black level, and even then the combination of good colour accuracy and reasonable contrast means you’re unlikely to be disappointed.

Perhaps more important for work use is that Philips’ anti-glare coating works well. It did a great job of diffusing reflections, even under bright spotlights or sunlight streaming through our home office’s skylights. Horizontal viewing angles are nice and wide, too, so you shouldn’t miss the stand’s lack of side-to-side swivel too much.

If you’re tempted to tinker with the various preset picture modes in the on-screen display, I’d advise against it. The Economy mode reduces brightness to 136cd/m² and doesn’t impact upon colour accuracy or contrast, but you could get the same effect by manually lowering the brightness. One thing worth mentioning, however, is that the Movie and Games modes both enable dynamic contrast, which I recommend disabling at all times, while the Movie mode inexplicably bumps the colour temperature to 7500k, boosting brightness at the expense of colour accuracy. The Photos mode is baffling, too, as it simply bumps the brightness right up to the monitor’s eye-searing 354cd/m2 maximum while doing nothing to improve colour accuracy.

The 27E1N1600AE’s panel covers the entirety of the sRGB gamut and stretches beyond to cover 82.2% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, too, but that’s not enough to be useful for colour-critical work. Measured against the wider P3 colour gamut, the Philips’ average Delta E increases to 1.99, which is acceptable, but the maximum leaps up to 5.44 and several green and yellow tones peak well over a Delta E of 3, which indicates that you’re not seeing certain colours as they’re meant to look. Again, that’s fine for casual use, and you will see a wider range of colour in DCI-P3 than sRGB, but you won’t be able to rely on what you see on screen for photo or video editing purposes.

The quality of the backlighting is adequate. I measured brightness and contrast across 25 areas on the screen and found that it was 12% dimmer on the far right corner, and you can find similar drops in brightness across the upper and right-hand side portions of the screen. There is a little backlight leakage in these areas, too, but nothing egregious. I’ve seen monitors at twice the price which are noticeably worse.

Motion performance is actually quite respectable for a monitor that’s more focused on productivity than gaming. The 100Hz refresh rate is a real boon, too, as it makes for noticeably smoother scrolling up and down documents, and the monitor supports basic adaptive synchronisation for tear-free performance in games. It only supports AMD Freesync, though.

At default settings, the panel’s claimed 4ms response time seems a tad optimistic. Quickly scrolling through documents caused lots of doubling up of text, and there was noticeable smearing in faster-moving games. A quick delve into the OSD quickly rectifies matters, however. If you want to leave adaptive sync enabled then I’d recommend setting the QuickResponse mode to the middle ‘Faster’ setting as this cleans up motion without introducing any inverse ghosting or unwanted nasties. Turn off adaptive sync, however, and the MPRT mode does an equally great job of improving motion clarity at medium to high settings, even if it does progressively reduce peak brightness.

The 27E1N1600AE does also support HDR, but the panel and backlighting just aren’t good enough to warrant enabling it. The combination of modest peak brightness (354cd/m2), a sub 2,000:1 contrast ratio and no local dimming means that this monitor simply isn’t capable of doing justice to HDR content. If you prefer the look of a game with HDR enabled, then it’s an option, but I’d personally stick to SDR.

Philips 27E1N1600AE review: Are there any other features I should know about?

The in-built speakers are worth knowing about and then immediately forgetting about. You may find a use for them in a pinch – if your speakers or headphones malfunction, for instance – but the sound quality is typically awful.

There’s ample volume – I measured a peak of 61dBA from a metre away with pink noise – but the tinny, harsh sound quality means that music is unlistenable and speech on video calls quickly becomes unintelligible. Thankfully, there is a 3.5mm audio out at the rear of the monitor, so you can hook up a pair of speakers or a wired headset if needed.

Philips 27E1N1600AE monitor: Should I buy it?

With a budget of £200 and no idea what to spend it on, you could quite easily end up purchasing a vastly inferior monitor to the Philips. Yes, I could moan about the stand’s lack of portrait mode or side-to-side swivel, or take issue with the measly two USB-A ports at the rear, but for this money it’s about striking a good balance between image quality, features and ergonomics, and it’s here that the 27E1N1600AE scores highly.

Competitive post-work gamers will hanker for a monitor with a higher refresh rate, and perhaps a VA panel for improved contrast, too, but that’s probably a very small subset of the people who’ve managed to read this far down the page. For everyone else, this is a keenly priced, do-it-all monitor that’s as happy with spreadsheets and presentations as it is the odd game of Call of Duty, and that makes the Philips 27E1N1600AE a very worthy Best Buy.