Philips Brilliance 241P4

Today we're looking at the Philips P241P4 monitor, the natural successor to the firm's P241P3 (no, we don't think the name is very original either).  The new 24'' Full HD is aimed at business users, and the switch to an MVA display without losing any of the excellent strengths of its predecessor make it look like a very intriguing prospect.

Build Quality and Design: excellent features

That includes great usability, thanks to a height adjustable stand with a pivot mode allowing you to use it in landscape mode.  There's also a four-port USB hub on the outside.  A motion sensor at the front can tell when you move away from the monitor, and lowers the brightness accordingly.

For audio, there's a pair of 2 x 1.5 W speakers and a line out for headphones, while video is covered by VGA, DVI and DisplayPort inputs.  Already, this monitor has done better than around 80% of the competition in this section, but Philips doesn't stop there!  Because the firm has chosen an MVA display, the viewing angles are excellent, and blocks of colour look much more even than they would with TN technology.  It's hard to see why we wouldn't give the P241P4 five stars!

There is, however, one thing missing: a HDMI input, which makes it very hard to use the P241P4 as an extra TV.  But then again, Philips is aiming at professionals who are unlikely to want to wire their monitor up to a games console, TV decoder or DVD player.

Display: accurate colours and 3000:1 contrast

With its factory settings, the P241P4 is pretty much spot on, almost achieving perfect colour reproduction with a deltaE score of 3.4.

Fortunately, after a quick visit to the onscreen menu--to set the colour temperature to 7500 K--you can get the deltaE as low as 2.5, removing the slight red tinge that got in the way of perfect whites at the same time.

The contrast ratio of 3000:1 is not just excellent but exceptionally rare for a desktop monitor.

Responsiveness: working overdrive--at last!

Philips has finally fitted a user-adjustable overdrive system, so there's no more Hobson's choice between awful responsiveness or aggressive reverse ghosting.  Taking the SmartResponse setting from Off up to 1 in the menus gives the 241P4 the chance to improve its ghosting time from 28 ms to 17.5 ms.

Responsiveness
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That's an improvement, but it still doesn't make the P241P suitable for gamers: fast-moving objects won't quite look sharp.  We've often complained about Philips' problems with this feature in the past, and although the firm has taken a while, we're glad to see it has finally responded.
 
The input lag is comfortably underneath the threshold of human visual perception, with an average delay of around 13.3 ms, meaning the P241P4 won't cause any problems when you're having a multiplayer session.