Philips 27B1U7903 4K Thunderbolt 4 Mini-LED Monitor Review

Display Analysis

Right out of the box, this monitor scores the highest colour gamut of any display I’ve ever tested, and I’ve tested a lot of them over the last 12 years. 99% of DCI-PI is just… well, wow. Like I said, that’s by far the best result I’ve ever seen, truly astonishing colour coverage.

Gamma

The default Gamma setting is 2.2, and as you can see, it’s slightly off and has a weird dip at 20-30%, this is due to the local dimming throwing off the result.

With local dimming disabled it’s right on the money, but honestly, leave dimming on, as this is merely the sensor not being able to understand the panel rather than the first result actually being worse.

The same is true with the grey ramp, it’s a little bumpy looking, but actually still very accurate for our ideal 6500K target.

Grey Ramp

There’s very little deviation, and again it looks smoother here with dimming turned off, but looks better in the real usage with dimming turned on.

The contrast is staggering, with extremely low black levels that are virtually as good as OLED, as the backlight is literally just off in those areas, yet the white point is still dazzling with an SDR peak brightness of 830 nits, which is BRIGHT!!! This can go up to a staggering 1400 nits in the highest HDR mode.

Brightness

Colours

Colour uniformity is very good too, with a slight warmness in the mid-section, but honestly, anything under 5 is good enough to look uniform to the human eye, so again, no issues here, especially so given this is at 100% brightness, with is a lot of brightness for a panel this powerful.

down at 50% brightness, which is still a lot (I personally set it to 20% for daily usage!) the colour accuracy throughout the panel because significantly more uniform.

Stock colour accuracy is actually pretty good, but not exactly what I expected it to be out of the box. This is because you have to tell the monitor what kind of colour accuracy you would like. It’s built for a wide range of colour spaces in both SDR and HDR formats. It is factory calibrated but you need to set it to sRGB and Uniformity modes, while the out-the-box settings are NTSC.

Setting it to sRGB and running a full calibration using my calibration tool, the colour accuracy this display is capable of really shines. Under 5 is good, under 3, it’s pretty hard for a skilled person to see the colour inaccuracies, but an average score of 0.88? Well, that’s pretty much the best I’ve ever seen again!

Monitor Rating

I don’t normally show this section in my reviews, as not all monitors require all the tests, but at stock settings, this is the best result I’ve ever seen. The uniformity score is 4 not 5 due to the backlight adjusting and tricking the sensor, and the colour accuracy was increased to 5 after a calibration, making the overall rating a 4.75, which is again the best I’ve seen to date.