This Philips monitor is a sharp slicer
The Philips Blade goes to show that if when
we look around for a good monitor to fulfil our needs, Sharpness is really one
thing that gets us perked. We're looking at Sharpness in imagery and Sharpness
in design and execution. We'd say that it's the sort of monitor that's a cut
above the rest, but that's overusing our pun-per-article ratio. We'll just say
that we like it. A lot. And that it's really good.
We're first impressed, upon unboxing it,
with its slimness. The Philips Blade isn't the thinnest monitor we've seen, but
it's undoubtedly among the slimmest around. It's also amazingly light; we found
that out when we lifted it up. That makes it quite a room saver.
The Philips Blade's slimness is attributed
mostly to its stand, which houses most of the components other monitors are oft
to place at the back of the screen. On this stand are the touch-sensitive
buttons, which lights up blue when activated. The input/output ports are
situated at the back of the stand, and you get single VGA and HDMI ports. There
is, perhaps shockingly, no DVI connectivity here, and while it's justifiable to
say that you get most out of HDMI anyway, the absence of it matters when we're
more used to DVI connectivity in the office.
The touch-sensitive control buttons are
named SmartTouch, and aptly so. We like that the Blade's navigation and
settings are uncomplicated and accessible, and it's easy to toggle between
viewing modes.
It's really the Blade's display quality
that, shall we say, cuts the cake. The LED-backlight here brings a lot of
brightness to the display, and the images are satisfyingly crisp. The colour
reproduction here is great, and the 20,000.000:1 contrast ratio does very well
in displaying dark images (it doesn't smudge much, either). The viewing angle
on the screen caps at 170-degrees and doesn't fade when tilted, which is great
considering that it's not an IPS display.
You can also toggle on SmartResponse and
have the monitor display at 2ms response time, which does a good job reducing
jaggy edges for fast moving objects. By virtue of that, the monitor is great
for pretty much everything, movies to games to worksheets.
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Philips Blade 224CL2
Price $ 165
Info www.philips.com
Specifications
Resolution: Up to 1920 x 1080 @ 60Hz
Panel: TFT-LCD, W-LED backlight
Screen: 20-inches
Response Time: 2ms GTG
Contrast Ratio: 20,000,000:1 (DCR)
Stand: Tilt
Connectivity: HDMI, VGA, 3.5mm jack
Dimensions: 514 x 389 x 175 mm
Weight: 2.57kg
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