Philips 45B1U6900C 32:9 SuperWide Curved Business Monitor Review

Performance

When it comes to productivity, screenspace can be a huge advantage. I’m a dual monitor user myself, with a 21:9 ultrawide in front of me and a smaller 27″ 16:9 monitor on the right that I can turn from portrait to landscape to suit my needs. However, I’m often moving the monitors on their arms to josstle for the space needed for various tasks, and it’s a bit of a pain at times. However, at 45″ SuperWide, no more moving of the screen is needed, as there is screen everywhere! I just need to move the windows on my desktop around instead.

As you can see above, two windows side by side is easy, as that gives you a full 16:9 aspect ratio for each frame. Basically the same as using two monitors side by side. But honestly, three windows side by side is a breeze for this monitor too, as you can see below, no scaling is needed on three instances of eTeknix.com.

Even four windows work great, which is the equivalent of doing side by side on a 16L9 monitor, twice. honestly, this is pretty sweet! With the curved panel wrapping around you, everything looks very natural and easy to read.

For video watching, again, two full widescreen images fit just fine, and while there’s very little need to watch two videos at the same time, for those who need to do comparison work while editing, it can be a huge advantage.

While this isn’t a professional monitor in terms of colour calibration, its size is extremely advantageous. This means music, video and image editing timelines in most popular editing software is vast, reducing the need for scrolling and zooming to see your workflow.

Working in spreadsheets? No problem, even some of our vast testing spreadsheets are easily visible on this monitor. It’s also a good example of the light levels. It’s pretty bright in here, but the brightness on this monitor has little issue dealing with that, and it’s very clear to read.

Need a giant stock ticker? Done!

I do watch a lot of movies, but good luck finding a movie quite as wide as this panel. Some of the widest films out there like Ben Hur or The Hateful Eight, still can’t match the massive width of this panel. Still, you could enjoy the full frame of the movie, and still have a section at the side to have Discord open, if you wanted to.

Here’s something amusing, watching content in 4:3 results in the biggest black borders in history.

There’s very little native 32:9 content on the market though, it’s mostly gaming footage some people have captured or some home video content and drone footage on YouTube. Still, it’s pretty breathtaking to have such a wraparound video playing, pictures will not do the experience justice.

There are games out there that support 32:9, not a huge amount, but it’s a growing list. Annoyingly, Rocket League does, but only at a lesser resolution, but Horizon Zero Dawn supported the full 5120 x 1440 resolution and 32:9 aspect and it looks utterly breathtaking.

I mean, I know this isn’t a “gaming monitor” but hey, a panel this big and 75 Hz still gets the job done.

For competitive gaming, the panel isn’t fast enough and has some ghosting issues at very high speeds, but again, I’m not knocking it down a few points for something it wasn’t designed to do. However, kicking back in an RTS game is a blast, and having such a view of the map is really great.