Philips Evnia 49″ 5120×1440 240Hz QD-OLED HDR Ultrawide Gaming Monitor Review

Performance

There’s little I can do to convince you of how good this panel looks. As am showing you a compressed online jpeg taken on my phone of a true OLED HDR 10-bit panel. However, as you might expect, the OLED black levels are simply zero nits, they’re utterly black and that looks stunning. However, because it’s a QD-OLED the colour reproduction is pretty much as good as you can expect from any panel technology on the market today. It’s a true 10-bit panel too, not 8-bit with some trickery, so it promises to hit around NTSC 127.4%, sRGB 153.1%, Adobe RGB 125.2% and 99% of DCI-P3 colour spaces.

For movies, the panel certainly impresses, but it does come with compromise. There are virtually no movies that I know of that actually are shot in such a wide format. Most modern movies are shot in 2.35:1 anamorphic scope, which still results in black bars on the sides. Even the likes of Ben-Hur which was shot in 2:76:1 won’t fill it. The upshot is you get used to side black bars quickly enough, given you’ve likely seen horizontal ones for decades. Plus, with OLED, there’s no backlight bleed on the black areas, so it’s not distracting at all.

Productivity is king here, it’s literally like having two 16:9 monitors, so you can comfortably have 2-6 windows open and clearly see them all with little effort. Heck, you can have a full 16:9 window dead center, and still have two portrait windows of 8:9 on each side!

It’s a huge boon for production too, as if you’re playing in a video editor, having such a large and visible object timeline is just fantastic to have.

However, it’s in gaming that this monitor blows your mind. The support list for 21:9 monitors is massive now, but there’s growing support for 32:9 Super-Ultrawide too. Some amazing person has even compiled a master list of all the games, and there’s way more than I thought!

Having this much screen isn’t just immersive, it feels like you could fall into the gaming world! It doesn’t feel distracting at all, as it simply fills your peripheral vision, which of course, feels completely natural as that’s how your eyes work every day.

The big thing is the resolution and refresh rate. I’m used to 3440×1440 on a 34″ ultrawide, but with this being so big, that resolution risks looking a little rough, so the increase to 5120×1440 works really well, and as you may have figured, it’s literally the same as having two 2560×1440 side by side, giving you the same pixel density as 2 x 27″ 1440p monitors.

But then we have the refresh rate, at 240Hz, this thing is FAST, and honestly, getting 240Hz even on a single Full HD monitor can put the breath out of an RTX 4090, and this is twice that resolution vertically and then doubles that again on the horizontal. However, that certainly makes it future-proof for future flagship graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia.