Philips 244E2

After our look at the Philips 224E2, today we're testing the larger 24'' 1920 x 1080 pixel version of the same monitor.

Like its little brother, it claims to be 'ready to immerse you in the Gaming and Movie world,' so we were expecting more or less the same results.  Our tests, however, revealed a few differences.

Hardware: VGA, DVI, HDMI and a headphone jack

The 244E2 isn't an example of perfect usability and it only differs slightly from the 22'' in this respect.  You can only tilt the panel back a few degrees, but it's the connectivity options that are left to make up for that.  This time, the VGA, DVI and HDMI ports aren't joined by a pair of speakers, but a headphone jack.  That means you can pick up the audio signal from a HDMI source and then send it on to your headphones or a set of 2.0/2.1 speakers.

Colours: a few tweaks

This time round, we had no problem with over the top contrast, but the colours needed a few tweaks to make them closer to the original.  With the default settings, the discrepancy between the colours requested by the graphics card and those actually shown onscreen, or deltaE score, is 3.8.  That's a little too high to say that colours are reproduced accurately, but it's not dreadful either.


To improve things, you need to turn the brightness down to 75, switch the colours to 'user-defined' and then set green to 95 and blue to 93.  That gets the deltaE down to 2.3, which leaves the colours looking spot on.

Unfortunately, these adjustments still don't send the contrast soaring.  At best, the contrast ratio peaks at 750:1, below our average of 850:1.  It's a shame, because with deeper blacks, the 244E2 could have hoped for a fifth start in this section.

Responsiveness: save it for office work

Responsiveness is the only thing that varies between the 22'' and 24'' monitors.  Whether, you go the 224E2 or the 244E2, neither can hope to please gamers.  Fast moving objects just aren't rendered fluidly enough.

Responsiveness
Light Background	Dark Background	Average

If you'd still like to try it out with your favourite games, then you should know that at least the input lag is invisible to the naked eye, so monitor won't hold you back if you're going multiplayer.