55” 4K 120Hz “Monitor” – Ultimate Gaming TV – Philips Momentum 55
|£1000 is a lot of money, there’s no two ways around that. But it does depend on the context. £1000 for a car, yeah ok that makes sense. £1000 for a house, corr your laughing yes please. £1000 for a phone, well that’s a bit much. But £1000 for a “monitor”, or is it a TV, either way, £1000 would normally be a lot, except this is no ordinary monitor. This is the Philips Momentum 55” Gaming Monitor. It’s 4K, runs at 120Hz, and is mind blowingly beautiful. Oh and comes with a killer soundbar attached. So, you want to hear more? Me too. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos every Monday, Wednesday and Friday!
The Philips Momentum line of monitors started a few years ago, mostly targeting console gamers, with a 43” model. Now, they’ve stepped it up with this 55” model, which now runs at 4K 120Hz, and comes with a Bowers & Wilkins soundbar pre-attached. It’s a VA panel, meaning it’s a little slow although we’ll talk about that in a sec, but otherwise the spec sheet glistens with HDR1000 support, 100% coverage of the sRGB spectrum and comes factory calibrated with a delta e of under 2.
As far as console gaming displays go, especially the new consoles that are just coming out, this monitor’s main competition is 4K TVs. There are a lot out now for 3, 4, 5, 600, but those are nowhere near as impressive as this. I mean it’s true 120Hz, at 4K. It’s got over 1000 nits peak brightness AND comes with a great soundbar, unless you can find the illusive TCL model not available in the UK, you’d need to pay £1500 or more for a similar spec from LG or Samsung.
Now like I said, there is a downside, the VA panel. It’s not overly quick, even with the pixel response time setting in the on screen menu set to “Fastest”, with a measured 8ms black to white response time. It’s not tragic, but it’s not overly fast. That manifests as a fair bit of ghosting, as you can see with the UFO there is quite the trail. I did notice it in fast paced games like CSGO, although with a controller and a console I’m not sure it’s as big a deal.
Input lag is definitely a concern, but it need not be. Just 4ms measured at the top of the display, which while not the fastest is still light years better than most TVs – although some of the newer ones do have gaming modes you can stick them in to get closer to this. The total system input lag was around 35ms, which sits it squarely in the “decent but not amazing” category. Clever name, i know.
But it’s not all about gaming. If you’ve got a 55” display, odds are this is gonna be your main TV too, so how does it perform those duties? Really well. Impressively bright, great colours to the eye, HDR capable should you want it and the sound bar, while not the most bass heavy and obviously can be out performed by a full room or dedicated setup, offers a great sound profile, fairly full sounding without heavy emphasis on any specific range like bass, and definitely sounds better than most built in TV speakers.
As for the rest of it’s features, one is called “Ambiglow”. Basically, it’s a string of insanely bright RGB LEDs on the back of the display that can follow what is roughly on screen to help extend the viewing experience and be more immersive. See, on the windows desktop background, the whole room becomes light blue. In the “follow video” mode, it’s pretty slow to update so can end up being more distracting than you’d like, but you can just set it to a single colour or leave it on “auto”, although that seems to have a little software bug where it flashes white at the end of it’s cycle. I’m sure there will be a firmware update to fix that soon.
Of course, inputs wise you’ve got a good selection. 3 HDMI ports and 1 DisplayPort, along with a USB 3 Hub with 2 yellow charging ports – so as long as the display has power, those will charge anything that’s plugged into them. And the stand is pretty nice too, even has tilt adjustment built in, or you can VESA mount it instead.
So, it sounds like an amazing display at a pretty reasonable price point for where it’s at, right? Well yes, but there is a massive catch. Those HDMI ports, are only HDMI 2. The only way you can run at 4K 120Hz is over DisplayPort, something the new generations of consoles don’t have. Adapters might become available from HDMI 2.1 to DisplayPort 1.3 or 1.4, but out of the box, yeah this won’t work. If you are using a PC, you’ve got no concerns, it’s a great display, a little slow but for a 55” panel it’s definitely not bad. But if you are after a console gaming experience, it’s missing a fairly key feature.