Philips Brilliance 234CL2SB

The Philips Brilliance 234CL2SB (also know as the 'Blade' LED display) is a 23-inch Full HD monitor with a 2 ms TN panel. Like a lot of monitors, the Brilliance 234CL2SB uses LED backlighting instead of a tube-based set-up, which makes for a much slimmer design. What's more, according to Philips, this monitor offers 'a new level of cool sophistication' but still at a decent price.

Hardware: all in the stand

There's no denying that this monitor is very attractive. You might want to look rather than touch though, as its entirely glossy finish makes it a real magnet for fingerprints. To keep the overall design as slim as possible, Philips has equipped the Brilliance 234CL2SB with an external power source and moved the connections (VGA and HDMI entries) on to the monitor's stand, which unfortunately only allows you to tilt the screen very slightly. You can listen to sound from the HDMI input via the headphones socket but there are no built-in speakers. With all that taken into account, the 234CL2SB only gets two stars in this category. 

Colours and Contrast: adjustment needed

This monitor doesn't display accurate colours with the factory settings. Even before we got our sensor anywhere near the screen we could clearly see a purple tinge in flesh tones. The practical tests merely served to confirm that this 23-inch display has a heavy blue overtone. The gamma curve (the distribution of brightness) is also much too low at 1.8 instead of 2.2. You'll therefore need to get straight into the internal menu to sort things out!


In the OSD, switch the gamma and colour temperature to 2.6 and 5000 K respectively and the colours will be much better. As you may remember, deltaE quantifies the difference between the actual colours requested and those displayed by the monitor. Once you've adjusted the gamma and colour temperature this drops from 7 to 3.6, which is certainly an improvement, although still above the level at which colours can be considered perfect (deltaE < 3). To get anything better, you'll have to use a calibration profile.

The 800:1 contrast ratio we measured is nothing special and brings the Philips Brilliance 234CL2SB in slightly lower than average compared with the monitors we've tested (850:1).

Responsiveness: another not-quite 2 ms monitor from Philips

The SmartResponse function is supposed to boost the monitor's responsiveness, but switching it on causes a reverse ghosting effect. That means you'll see ghost images or trails behind moving objects in the opposite colours to those of the object itself.  This seems to be something of a recurring problem in Philips 2 ms monitors and we therefore don't recommend using this function.


As it stands then, the display is no better than a classic 5 ms monitor. Such screens aren't really geared up for gaming as they can't keep up with fast movements, causing the image lack fluidity and smoothness in action-packed scenes. This also pushes up the ghosting time.

Measured responsiveness
Light background	Black background	Average

It's a shame that the ghosting time wasn't better really, since this monitor's input lag really isn't bad at all. In fact, with better responsiveness the Brilliance 234CL2SB would have made a nice gaming monitor. Better luck next time Philips!