Philips 227E3LH

The 227E3LH is a 22'' Full HD monitor from Philips with a 2 ms response time.  The manufacturer is clearly hoping that it will over gamers keen for both a stylish design and an impressive spec, which is ambitious stuff.

Standard design

The 227E3LH has a fairly standard design, and the only interesting features are the inputs and outputs, which include the usual trio of VGA, DVI and HDMI for video, as well as a pair of speakers and a headphone jack at the bottom.  You can tilt the display back a few degrees, but that's about it.
 

The combination of a HDMI input and an audio output mean you can in theory use it as an extra television, connected to your tuner or IP TV box, or alongside a DVD player or games console.

Reverse ghosting

Whenever Philips bills one of its monitors as having a 2 ms response time, reverse ghosting inevitably crops up, and this monitor is no exception.  We suggest you deactivate the 'Smart Response' feature to get around the problem, but that means you fall back to a classic 5 ms TN-based display.


This problem is so widespread that we've come to expect it on every Philips monitor we test.  Every time we spot it on one of the company's supposedly 2 ms monitors, we raise the issue with them, but in over three years, nothing has changed.  In the absence of any action, we're hoping that one day we'll fall on the exception that proves the rule which might well save Philips' otherwise excellent reputation.  Here's hoping, anyway ...

Responsiveness
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The immediate consequence of so much ghosting is that fast-moving objects appear blurry.  We definitely advise against this monitor if you plan to play a lot of video games, but if you're going to be doing something whether the display changes less rapidly, it should be less problematic.

There weren't any problems with input lag, which is well below the threshold of human perception and so won't have any kind of impact on multiplayer gaming.

Colours: compulsory calibration

Given the disastrous responsiveness, Philips was going to have to pray for accurate colour reproduction in order to save the day, but with the default settings at least, the results are far from impressive.  With a deltaE score of 6.0, colours aren't accurate enough, and the gamma curve is much too high.


We tried—and failed—several times to tweak the settings before admitting that the only way to get accurate colours on the Philips 227E3LH is via a calibration profile.

The contrast doesn't help much either as this monitor barely manages an average contrast ratio of just over 700:1, well short of the average found on other monitors and another nail in the 227E3LH's coffin.  In this case, it's doubly disappointing as this one thing that Philips usually gets right.  This time around, though, it's what finally condemns it to a score of just two stars.