Philips ENVIA 34M2C8600 QD-OLED Ultrawide Review

This might just be the display we’ve all been waiting for. This is part of Philips’ new EVNIA range, with this being the 32M2C8600, a 3440×1440, 175 Hz Quantum Dot OLED panel. Oh god I’m so excited! Let’s run this thing through its paces to see if it’s worth the grand-and-a-bit price tag – and I sure hope it is because OLED gaming monitors are the absolute pinnacle of monitor performance. 

I’m going to do something a little different here and start with the bad stuff. You’ll understand why in a second. The first thing to note is the brightness. The 34M2C8600 will only hit around 250 nits at peak brightness. Now that is plenty for a dark room, but if you want to use this in brighter environments you might struggle. It can do up to 1000 nits in HDR (well, 3% of the entire display can hit that), but your average usage is maxed at 250 nits. It also features an adaptive brightness limiter – ABL – although to Philips’ defence I’ll say this is one of the least intrusive ABLs I’ve used. This response time graph shows it nicely – on higher brightness colours the panel will hit a decent light level. Then it will slowly trickle down to a lower level it is more comfortable sitting at. Compare what the EVNIA does to what the Aorus FO48U I reviewed last year does. Look how hard it cuts back. That was painfully obvious – in fact here’s a clip that shows just how obvious it was. It was a legitimate distraction. This EVNIA doesn’t have that problem. Honestly I can’t say I even noticed it – I only knew when the response time results came back a bit whacky. 

Something to note is actually the pixel arrangement. Philips calls this an “RGB Q-Stripe” layout, which is basically a triangular collection of red, green and blue subpixels. An LCD pixel layout might look something like this – whereas this QD OLED panel is more like this. Often that would mean text looks off especially in Windows, but generally speaking I can’t say I’ve had that problem. They are so tightly nested, and still in the red green blue format that I don’t think it’s much of an issue. At least for me anyway.

Another negative is that this does have a fan inside. Although, despite having a menu option to set it either to “Quiet” or outright “Off”, I can’t say that I heard it once. Maybe it wasn’t running because it doesn’t need to with just regular SDR usage, or because the temperature has cooled down a bit this week, or maybe it is running but they’ve done such a good job masking it that you’d need to be in an anechoic chamber to hear it. Either way, it has a fan, but I didn’t hear it so it’s not a problem for me.

One last negative is the colour accuracy. Philips’ website claims this should have a DeltaE of less than two, but in my testing it reported more like 2.8 average, with a lot of results well, well over two. Now a good calibration can sort this so that isn’t a big deal, but it is a bit of a shame the calibration seems to have slipped already. Perhaps the pixel refreshes have already taken their toll on the accuracy. The good news that contrasts the lack of accuracy is the colour gamut coverage is still excellent. It covers 98% of the DCI P3 spectrum in my testing, which means this offers vibrant, rich colours – and of course being an OLED you get functionally perfect blacks for an effectively infinite contrast ratio. The glossy screen coating does do a little to limit the enjoyment of that for me, but still. It looks beautiful, if a little dim.

Ok, that’s the bad stuff, now let me show you the good stuff. First off, response times as you’d expect are instant. Philips quotes 0.03ms which seems like an excessive claim – OSRTT Pro reckons it’s more like 0.5 to 1 ms, but that is still functionally perfect. It does still do the weird overshoot behaviour all OLEDs seem to exhibit, but a quick look at the UFO test confirms there isn’t much to be worried about. Transitions are instant, which should make for a stunning gaming experience. Input lag is under one frame, averaging to 3ms or so, which is perfectly fine. The time sleuth reckoned it was more like 11ms over HDMI, although that was a 1920×1080 60 Hz signal that the monitor had to convert to native res which might be adding some latency, so I wouldn’t be too worried there. 

I/O is pretty decent too, with DisplayPort 1.4, two HDMI 2.0 ports, USB C for DisplayPort ALT Mode, and a four port USB 3 hub with one yellow charging port, and two ports in a more exposed (although still downward facing) location. You also have Philips’ Ambiglow, both as an array of RGB LEDs on the back, and a full strip along the curved bottom of the panel. You can set them to a number of different modes, including having them follow what’s on your screen, or the standard collection of waves, breathing and more. You can also turn them all fully off if that isn’t your thing. Personally when this is up against a wall this looks fantastic, although if your monitor is more out in the open like this, I’d probably save the power and turn them off.

The on screen menu is controlled by a joystick style switch on the back and has a decent number of options for you to play with, including multiple levels of backlight – or I guess whole-panel – strobing. That does disable Freesync though, and is absolutely terrible for your eyes so I’d personally recommend leaving that off and Freesync on. And the stand is pretty nice too. It has plenty of adjustment for height, tilt and swivel – of course no rotation for an ultrawide like this which is fine. It does come with a VESA mount adapter in the box if you’d rather not use this though.

Right, I’ve been holding out on you because I wanted to save the best for last. Actually playing games on this thing is absolutely next level. Playing games with an instant response time and little to no latency is such an unreal experience – it actually took some getting used to! I’m so used to seeing a slightly blurred target that it took me a while to get my aim right when everything is so perfectly crisp. At 175Hz, while it isn’t quite the 240Hz you might find on some of the other OLEDs on the market, you get an incredibly smooth, fluid and enjoyable experience. I’m genuinely going to have a hard time going back to an LCD panel after using this. That’s how much I enjoyed playing on this thing. The fact that the brightness limiter is nowhere near aggressive, even when playing at max brightness, it just feels like the perfect gaming monitor. It really does. 

Now I don’t want to burst the bubble too soon, but you will need to have deep pockets for this one. It’s currently on sale for a touch over £1,000 – £1,141 as of writing. That ain’t cheap – and being a 1440p 175 Hz ultrawide, you’ll need a decent spec system to back that up too, so this is a rich boys toy. But, my god what a toy. If you compare this to the Acer X32 FP I reviewed last week, I’d take this any day of the week instead. Sure it’s half as bright, but I sit in the dark anyway so I don’t care much. I think I run my displays at around 150 nits anyway, so 250 would actually be overkill! The only thing I can’t tell you much about is burn-in – I only have this for a week or two and it’s still a relatively new monitor so it hasn’t been out enough to see how badly this might be affected. It does have the usual anti-burn-in techniques, including full pixel refreshes which essentially burn all the pixels down to the same level, a pretty aggressive screen saver and pixel orbiting – pixel shifting basically. Being a quantum dot OLED I have a little more faith it’ll last you a fair while. As long as you rotate what’s on screen you should be pretty fine. 

So in short, this is my new favourite monitor. It’s almost perfect, and the tradeoffs you do take really aren’t that big a deal – at least for me. It’s just a shame I can’t afford one… With that said, those are my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments down below. Do you think this is the perfect monitor, or are its blemishes too big a deal for you to ignore? Let me know in the comments – and of course if you are interested in picking one of these up yourself, or just checking out the price when and where you watch this, take a look at the global Amazon affiliate link the description down below.