Philips Momentum 55″ 4K HDR Ambiglow 120Hz Gaming Monitor

Setup

I can’t remember the last time I had to put so much work into simply getting to the point of turning on a product. Obviously, this is a big monitor and I would have had zero chance of getting it on my desk. So I had to dismantle my Philips Hue lighting setup, strip out a bunch of tech that was hiding behind my TV stand, remove my normal 49-inch 4K TV and make way for the new one. Of course, this is my TV in the picture below, but I wanted to show you a before and after as I have my own backlighting from Philips, and want to compare that to the Ambiglow.

Would you believe I measured it and there’s just enough room for a 55″ panel without moving my speakers. Happy days.

A few hours after the review started, it’s finally on the stand. I was a little concerned about the weight, it’s 50KG. Thankfully, my glass stand can hold up to 150KG, phew. Doesn’t it look tremendous though. There’s a matte finish to the screen that does a wonderful job of killing reflections and the bezel is extremely slim too, so far so good.

The soundbar looks great, and it appears to float above the stand and below the monitor thanks to its cleverly hidden mount.

They could have made it even wider, giving it better LCR separation, but I suspect there’s some angles going on with the speakers to widen the field anyway.

It fits the space really well, and of course, if you want to you can tilt it down or even back to suit your needs. I didn’t though, I like it dead straight as it suits my seating position just fine.

The remove is really simple, offering up what you would normally find on a monitor control panel. Power, menu, colour profile, brightness and volume. That’s about it really.

They even included some of their own batteries in the box.

Now, keep in mind that this is NOT a TV. You don’t get a TV tuner, you don’t get a bunch of built-in applications to play Netflix. You MUST have it paired up to something else to do anything really. I’ve got my Nvidia Shield TV and my Xbox One S, albeit it’s the Shield you’re seeing right now. Look how uniform those black levels are!

The menu is pretty much what you would expect from a typical PC monitor, a much simpler set of options compared to your typical smart TV. I like this better, no junk apps, it’s just a display.

It has some cool gaming focused features though, such as Crosshair, low input lag, etc.

You get plenty of built-in profiles too, but you can tweak the colours, brightness, gamma, etc too. Not that you’ll want to, it’s very well calibrated out of the box, so the brightness slider is about all you’ll want.

The Ambiglow lighting can be set to go on a colour cycle, to follow the image on the screen or to a fixed colour. Of course, you can turn it off or change the brightness too.

Hilariously the OSD offers three brightness settings, bright, brighter, and brightest. Perhaps having one called dim or low would make more sense.