Gadget: Phillips 272P4 27 inch monitor

The Phillips 272P4 monitor is very good, but you're paying for what you get.

This monitor is aimed largely at professional use – however I always review screens using games, because buying better hardware is part of what makes a PC gamer.

Lets start with the big positive – this is a 2560x1440 resolution 27 inch (68.6cm) monitor. That gives you a very clear image and allows for its HD multiview feature to kick in.

The style of display also reduces glare quite effectively – which is always a nice thing if you are using it by a window.

It has on of the best standard stands I have seen. The stand allows you to get the height exactly right for your eye, and it even allows you to pivot it 90 degrees.

The build quality is excellent; this feels like a really well made and solid monitor.

All of this gives you a price tag of about R11,119.

And that is the start of why I am not that impressed. Realise I can see where the money went – but if I was to pay that amount for a screen I would expect it to be pretty plug-and-play.

A higher price should mean less hassle right?

This monitor comes with a feature that changes the backlighting based on the light in the room.

This sounds cool right up until you are playing a game on it, and it suddenly goes dark for no apparent reason.

You can solve this by installing the software and setting the brightness in the environmental mode to 100%, effectively disabling the feature.

The 2560x1440 resolution is maybe not ideal for home use. The thing with higher resolution screens is that your graphics card needs to be more powerful to cope with it because it needs to cope with more pixels.

While 2560x1440 does look better than a 1920X1080 monitor, it will hit your performance to go with the former option.

And the 1920X1080 option costs less than half the price.

This monitor is aimed at professional use – and I tend to test by gaming.

For an artist I would say it is worth a look, but for home use I would recommend going down a little bit on the specs, and a lot on the price. For most games things like frame-rate are a lot more important than resolution.

You can see the full specifications on Phillips’ website.