Philips adds colour crystals to monitors for work, play

While the the traditional desktop may well be going the way of the dodo, the desktop monitor is fortunately not going with it.

Now in use by people who cart laptops around on a day-to-day — and that’s pretty much all of us — monitors fill the void left by the small screen, making those times that we’re forced to sit behind a desk a little more tolerable due to the fact that we can have a bigger screen to do our work on, especially handy if your eyesight isn’t perhaps what it used to be.

But if you’re wondering if all monitors are the same, you might be pleasantly surprised, because resolutions are changing, and so is the technology inside the screens.

We’ve seen screens and displays changing on mobile devices for a while, and finally monitors are no longer going with the el-cheapo displays across the board, with some choosing better panels which are in turn better for your eyes.

While the In-Plane Switching (IPS) screens are always preferable for viewing angles to screens with the gamer friendly hyper-fast Twisted Nematic (TN) screens, Philips has this week attempted to change the game by bringing in a technology introduced on TVs first, with quantum dot being thrown into the mix.

For those not quite aware of what a quantum dot is, this is a buzzword which can also refer to “nano-crystals” or even Sony’s “Triluminos” technology, and relates to tiny crystals that — when placed in front of an LED backlight — produce stronger colour, with this resulting in a better quality image for the LCD.

Outside of the laptop world, we haven’t seen this on monitors, until now, that is, with Philips readying two for release. Both monitors are practically the same, offering a 27 inch display with the 1920×1080 Full HD resolution in a white frame, with the option being either a silver and gold stand.

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MMD, the licensing partner of Philips, says the screens cover 99 percent of the Adobe RGB colour-space, while they achieve 100 percent of the sRGB space, suggesting designers and photographers should be able to use them as well as gamers and regular folk, and since there’s an IPS panel here, too, viewing angles should be good.

About the only quibbles we have are with resolution and display ports, and with no 4K resolution on offer — in fact, nothing higher than Full HD — we have to wonder why Philips and MMD didn’t try harder for a more modern screen, especially since nano-crystals have been employed.

Our other complaint is in the ports, and while monitor technology slowly gets better, the ports have changed dramatically over the years. In this screen — the 276E6ADSS and 276E6ADSW — you’ll only find mostly old ports, with VGA (D-SUB), DVI, and HDMI with support for MHL.

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That might seem like jargon, but it screams “old computers” rather than anything modern, especially since there’s no DisplayPort, Mini-DisplayPort, Thunderbolt, or several HDMI ports.

And that makes us think Philips and MMD may well be targeting people with old computers, as opposed to people keen on adding a bit of TV-class tech to their computer world.

If this is where you see yourself, you’ll find the Philip 276E6ADSS and 276E6ADSW in computers stores for a recommended retail price of $299 now.

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