Philips 34B2U5600C Ultrawide Business Monitor Review

Performance

Most office monitors top out at around 250 cd/m2 brightness, which is more often than not, plenty for just about all office spaces. However, the 34B2U5600C can push a little higher to 300 cd/m2 brightness, helping it deal with very bright spaces while still delivering a vibrant image from the panel. The colours look decent right out of the box, but at the same time, this isn’t a pro-colour display. However, it can deliver 120% of sRGB, and has good colour accuracy, but those wanting it for editing work would likely want something higher up the range, such as the Philips 27B1U7903 or the 25M2N3200W which have a much more extended colour range.

However, for day-to-day use in the home, office, or even the home office, that’s what the strengths of the 34B2U5600C really stand out. With such a large panel, you have prime real estate to easily put two windows side by side, saving you the added clutter and cables of having two monitors, while also not having to deal with the bezels between them. It’s just a nice and simple “get a bigger screen” solution to your productivity problems.

The monitor size also lends well to three windows on screen at a time, without having to compromise on zoom/scaling to accommodate them. This means I can watch a movie or some YouTube on the left side of the screen, have my work in the middle, and something to read on the right. Obviously, you can chop and change, but having media, work and data sources on one screen is beneficial to both my work and rampant procrastination; proven by the fact I’ve largely been watching the Ali G movie throughout the testing process.

For movies, the colours are vibrant and plenty bright, albeit the motion handling isn’t fantastic, but at 100Hz, frame pacing for movies isn’t going to sit quite right anyway as it’s not a multiple of 24Hz, but you can easily set that to a custom refresh rate to solve that.

Black levels are reasonable, no better or worse than you would expect from an edge-lit VA panel really, but if you’re used to a mini-LED or OLED panel, then it’s a far cry from those technologies, but again that’s reflected in the overall price of this monitor.

I did try some gaming on it, and well, it’s OK at best. It’s not what it was designed for, and 100Hz with 4ms response time on VA panel just doesn’t quite cut it for me in 2024. There’s a little bit of blur, and the monitor would really have benefitted from an Overdrive mode on this panel, but again, it’s not a gaming monitor, so does it really need it?

There’s a little bit of dark-level smear, the ball is moving in the direction of the arrow, so dark objects moving faster on bright backgrounds tend to have a purple tail. Again, this is a common trait of these panels and has been seen for many years, but if you’re just starting at your weekly sales reports and watching cat videos on reddit, you’re not likely to notice.