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

Performance

With a 4K and HDR panel on hand, it made perfect sense to start in those areas. Planet Earth II is a hell of a presentation for those wanting to check out amazing colour reproduction. The opening scene is great for testing contrast too. The black levels are really inky and uniform on this panel. There’s no backlight bleed or torching, and I mean NONE, it’s great! The brightness is exceptional too, with the sun ripping with a warm glow that my camera simply can’t do justice to.

The colour balance is remarkable. There’s no banding or compression that I can see, with the light to dark transition of the background having a smooth gradient throughout.

Fine details are ultra-clean looking as well. The sharpness was set to 50/100 in the OSD, but that’s clearly correct. There’s no blurring on the edges and no halos around finer details. It’s pixel perfect. The monitor has no edge-enhancement or other stupid processing features you often find on many “smart” TVs.

As you may have noticed, the Ambiglow is matching the images with a complimentary colour coming from each light relative to what’s near each one on the edge of the picture. It works quite well, but honestly, I find it very distracting. Fortunately, you can set it to a single colour and I find that much more pleasing. Of course, content, ambient light, viewing distance, etc, can change what works and what doesn’t.

While it may be a gaming monitor, it’s pretty fantastic for movies. It doesn’t have auto frame rate switching as a TV would. Fortunately, I can set my Nvidia Shield to output 24hz, so watching a movie doesn’t stutter typing to pace 24 FPS into a 60 Hz refresh rate. The HDR mode is stunning though, especially on the opening sequence for The Lion King (2019). However, I suggest changing from the default HDR1000 colour profile to the HDR Movie, as the former looks a bit flat and the movie mode looks far superior.

Viewing angles are exceptionally good. My LGTV has an IPS panel and the viewing angles are bloody awful. If you’re too low down the whole screen looks like a sheet of washed-out grey. However, on the Philips panel, up, down, left-right… the picture and colours stay accurate.

Amazing! The glare on the left is from the sun shining through the window by the way. However, the matte finish on the panel mutes the reflection extremely well.

Ambiglow. So here is my LG TV with a Philips Hue strip on the back. As you can see, it’s pretty good at throwing out some ambient light.

Here’s the Ambiglow throwing out some red, it’s VERY vibrant.

The kids picked Aladdin in the end, and after a full evening of watching movies, and parts of movies, we’re all very impressed. I mean, me, my partner and the two kids. Albeit, they may have been pulled in simply because the screen is bigger, that’s always a win for movie night.

Amazingly, this monitor is better equipped than any of the consoles I can connect to it… so far. 120Hz 4K is the sort of thing we’ll be seeing more of (to a certain extent) on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, or the even more anticipated PC-2, heh. Regardless, we fired up some Halo Master Chief Collection to see what was up. I’m used to having to switch (manually) to Game Mode to reduce latency, but even then, it’s not as low latency as this monitor. I think my TV outputs around 15-20ms, this is =< 4ms. You can really feel the difference too, we were playing on splitscreen swat, and everything felt so tight and responsive.

I even fired up some Fable II. Sure, testing the fast-paced stuff is easy, but the lower resolution and simpler graphics of Fable II help up really well. This game runs at 30hz as well and I found it caused ghosting on my LG TV, but there are no issues with that here.

I’m actually a little disappointed with the monitor at the moment because I don’t have access to console games that can really max it out. I could hook it up to a PC, sure, but I’d be eager to revisit this display when the new consoles are out and can really push those limits.