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With its uniform grey bezel, you could easily mistake the 273E3QH for a budget monitor, but look a little closer at its specifications and you’ll see that’s far from the truth. Philips has used a high quality Vertical Alignment (VA) panel, rather than the more common TN, as well as a white LED backlight for improved colour accuracy.
The 27in, 1,920×1,080 panel has a matte finish which diffuses light reflections effectively, meaning we could always see what was on the screen, even under fluorescent lighting. The VA panel also has 178-degree viewing angles, so you need to be practically side-on to the monitor before you notice any change in colour or darkening of the screen.
At the monitor’s default picture settings, we thought images looked slightly washed out, beyond what we would normally expect from a matte finish display. Even so, everything still looked sharp at the native resolution and the LED backlight was evenly lit across the entire panel, with no patches of uneven light or significant bleed in darker images. The monitor is certainly bright enough, and great contrast preserves plenty of shadow detail – Philips claims an absurdly high dynamic contrast ratio of 20,000,000:1, but this will of course vary depending on the on-screen content. We would have liked blacks to have been a little deeper, but unless you have a gloss or glass panel instead of a matte version, with the associated problems with reflections from overhead lights sources, you’ll never come close to true black.
To improve colour definition, we used the simple on-screen display (OSD), which you control with four touch-sensitive buttons built into the centre of the screen bezel. As well as a more customisable user setting, which gives you control over brightness, contrast, gamma and colour temperature, Philips also includes three SmartImage presets – Standard, Internet and Game. Internet reduced the brightness slightly to reduce eye-strain, but we recommend steering clear of Game – it ramped up image sharpness and blew colours up to unrealistic levels.
Once we’d run the screen through our Spyder4 calibration tool, colours looked much warmer and less washed out, although we did end up losing some of the finer shadow details in dark images as a result of the changes made. Whites weren’t quite as bright as we would have liked either, but they were at least an improvement over the default settings. You can achieve some great results with a few minutes of tweaking, bringing skin tones to a more realistic level and boosting colour vibrancy. According to the Spyder4’s software, after calibration the 273E3QH covers 95% of the sRGB colour space, which is very impressive for a sub-£250 monitor.
Aside from its high-quality panel, the 273E3QH is fairly basic for a £230 monitor. The stand isn’t height-adjustable and doesn’t rotate, although you can tilt it up to 20 degrees. Despite this, Philips has made sure the monitor is well-equipped for handling multiple video sources. It has VGA, DVI and (HDCP-compatible) HDMI inputs, and switching between each one takes a single button press. The 3.5mm audio in and output jacks give you the choice between using your own headphones or the screen’s integrated stereo speakers.
With only 2 watts RMS each, we weren’t expecting much in terms of sound quality, and unsurprisingly the 273E3QH produces weak audio. With no audible bass and a tinny high-end, only the mid-range is particularly clear and the speakers don’t go very loud. It’s fine for YouTube clips, but that’s about it.
We had few complaints about the 273E3QH. Picture quality is very good and the monitor is competitively priced compared to other VA panel displays. The next step up would be an IPS screen, but even the cheapest sets cost around £100 more than the Philips monitor. If you want excellent picture quality on a budget this is a great choice.
