Philips 27B1U5601H 27″ Business Monitor Review

Performance

Connectivity is king with this monitor, and it makes for not only an easy setup process but also some really exciting configurations. Given I have my work computer under my desk and then various test benches that I roll out from time to time, I can use the same monitor and peripherals to control both. This means I can side-by-side various benchmarking systems and it makes for a really easy workflow that takes up less space and time to keep on top of.

The panel looks great, and the combination of a 27″ panel size and a 2560 x 1440 resolution means a lovely pixel density and a very crisp image overall. Actually, the monitor also has pretty good peak brightness and black levels too, thanks to its IPS panel, so even if you’re in a brightly lit office space, the picture really pops.

The webcam isn’t something I really need, as I rarely show my face to the world, and the world is grateful for that I’m sure. Alas, if you are the unlucky sucker that has to have your camera on for daily Teams meetings, this monitor is honestly really fantastic.

The camera has good quality, the microphone is excellent, and the speakers are surprisingly powerful too. The noise cancelling tech on the microphone means that the speakers don’t feed back into the microphone too, so don’t worry about turning it up a bit louder.

I’ll get the Spyder monitor tool on here shortly, but honestly, I don’t think much calibration will be needed, if any. The panel looks really nice already, the colours look great, and for the most part, just picking a profile from the OSD is all most users will need to do.

The panel size and resolution lend well to having two windows side by side, everything looks nice and clear, so certainly no complaints there.

At 75Hz is a little smoother in terms of motion than a standard 60Hz panel. It doesn’t sound like a big improvement, but honestly, you can feel the difference. This is not a gaming monitor, or at least, it’s not marketed at one. However, great colours, a good refresh rate, a good resolution… If you want to fire up your favourite games on this at the end of the workday, it’s going to deliver a solid experience.