Philips Evnia 8000 34″ Curved QD OLED Gaming Monitor Review

OSD

The OSD is pretty much the same as we’ve seen on previous Philips monitors, albeit, it was some OLED-specific features too, but we’ll get to those. You can adjust all the usual, brightness, colour temperature, etc, as you might expect, so calibration (if you ever need it) is easy enough. Frustratingly though, in any of the HDR modes you can not adjust the brightness, it just pins to peak, which is frustrating given OLED doesn’t even have a backlight to deal with.

There’s no G-Sync but Adaptive Sync works just fine should you need it.

There’s all Crosshairs, DarkBoost and Low Input Lag for gamers, and interestingly, SharpShooter mode that zooms in on the crosshair section… very strange, not sure who’d use that, but whatever.

The RGB is simple enough, all controlled through the OSD rather than software, and offers up a range of colours or a rainbow effect. You can choose which sides omit light, and of course, turn it off.

I am amused that the brightness settings are bright, brighter and brightest, there’s no “dim” option, albeit, this really does just translate as low, medium and high, of course.

I have the monitor far from the wall (as I have my work monitor wall mounted behind it), and I have absorbent dark foam around that, so the effect is toned down. However, it lights up my keyboard nicely, it’s pretty cool, and the effects are pretty much what we’ve seen from Ambilight technology over the many years Philips has been doing it, which is to say it works well.

The speakers are surprisingly competent for a downward-firing design. The body of the monitor is quite thick, so it gives it more bass than most monitors can hope for. It’s more in line with a good set of laptop speakers, vs most monitors that sound like a bad set of laptop speakers. However, it does have a bunch of profiles that help quite a lot; especially the music one.

There’s even a full EQ, wasn’t expecting that! But again, it’s a very welcome feature.

The USB-C and KVM features are pretty basic but functional and even allow for charging while the monitor is in standby mode.

OLED panels need a lot of extra care, and while the burn-in issues of early panels are pretty rare or hard to screw up these days, there are some preventative features enabled to further protect the panel. But the Pixel Refresh is a pain, it pops up after a while of using the monitor with a long-worded warning like “Pixel refresh needs to perform something… 7 minutes…” and honestly, there are like 20 words after that, but it fashes up for 2 seconds and turns the monitor off leaving me staring at a black screen. I turned that right off after 2 days and 3 pop-ups. Philips, make the warning pop up for longer and give me a yes-no or delay for 1-hour prompt to proceed, please.

The fan can be set to Auto or quiet, both of which sound the same to me, or off. Honestly, I turn it off at night as I set the brightness quite low and if the panel could overheat, I saw no evidence of that, and no part of the monitor or housing ever felt warm either.

There are five HDR modes on this panel, the first 3 offer the ability to hit the peak 1000 nits in a 3% area, and they do look vibrant, but leave them alone. The HDR True Black caps the panel at 400 nits, and honestly, it looks amazing and it is also the only colour accurate of the bunch. 400 Nits isn’t a lot for a LED panel, but when you don’t need a backlight, and the blacks are pure black, 400 really pops in HDR.