Philips 273P3

Philips' latest monitor is the 273P3LPH, a 27'' Full HD screen with a spec that should please just about everybody.  On paper, it boasts fast response times, a wide range of accessories and a motion sensor to turn it off when you leave the room.  It sounds like it could be an excellent monitor,  but let's take it for a spin in the lab to see how it performs in real life ...

Build Quality and Design: a real star

It's hard to find fault with either the basic features or the design.  The Philips 273P3LPH has a height-adjustable stand on a rotating base, and if that isn't flexible enough for you, it also spins round to portrait mode.  Video inputs come in the shape of the three usual suspects (VGA, DVI and HDMI), while audio is handled by a pair of 2 x 2 speakers and a line in for anybody not picking up audio from the HDMI cable.  There's also a headphone jack if you'd prefer to use some other speakers.  But Philips hasn't stopped there: it has also included a four port USB 2.0 hub and a motion sensor that first dims the backlighting and then turns it off if you're away from the screen for too long (see the inset).

We haven't tested many monitors that can rival this list of features.  The Asus PA246Q, for instance, beats it with wider vertical viewing angles because it doesn't rely on a TN display.  That gives it more even colour reproduction across the whole surface of the screen and the portrait mode is more usable because of those wider viewing angles.  With the TN panel inside the 273P3LPH, the picture looks either too dark or too light unless you are looking directly at the screen.

Responsiveness: Philips will fix its overdrive problem one day soon.  We hope!

As it always does, Philips encouraged us to try the SmartResponse feature available in the onscreen menu which is supposed to improve the response time.  Unfortunately, though, this inevitably leads to reverse ghosting, a consistent problem on the company's 2 ms monitors.  We're not just talking about a few light traces: the effect is visible whatever colour the moving object is.  You're better off leaving SmartResponse turned off.

Responsiveness
Light Background	Dark Background	Average

Indeed, it seems the 273P3LPH has abandoned all hope of accurately reproducing fast moving objects, with a ghosting time as high as 20.5 ms.   That's one areas that's essential for winning over gamers where it has totally failed.

Couleurs: one tweak is all it takes

With the default settings, the colour temperature was a little too low, at 5200 K instead of 6500 K, giving a red tinge.  The gamma, which describes the way brightness is spread out across different shades of grey, also fell short of our expectations with an average of 2.0 instead of the 2.2 we were hoping for.

But by using the onscreen menu to set the colour temperature to 7500 K and the gamma to 2.4--theoretically above the ideal values--these problems can easily be solved.  The deltaE, or average discrepancy between the colours that should be shown onscreen that and those that actually are, falls from 3.6 to 2.6, a much better figure.

With that more accurate colour reproduction, you can happily buy a new sweater online without worrying that it will be a different colour to the one you expected, or, more seriously, do real photo editing or graphics work, even if a monitor with an IPS or VA panel would be more ideally suited to this task.

Finally, a contrast ratio of 1040:1 means that that this monitor comes in above our average figure of 850:1.