Philips EVNIA 5500 32” 1440p 240Hz Curved VA – Philips 32M2C5500W Review

This is one of the cheapest 1440p 240Hz monitors on the market, and yet it’s one of the better ones. Here’s an in depth look at the Philips EVNIA 5500, otherwise known as the 32M2C5500W. This bad boy is 32 inches diagonally, runs at 2560×1440 and up to 240Hz, and rather miraculously, Philips claims this curved VA panel has a 0.5 millisecond GREY TO GREY TIME! That’s an incredibly bold statement and of course with the help of my newest Open Source Response Time Tool model, the Pro CS, we’ll be putting that to the test! Philips also claims this can do 500 nits of peak brightness, with a 4000:1 contrast ratio. Not bad! 

Physically, this follows the rest of Philips’ EVNIA line – save for the white colour scheme. This is a lighter-than-usual grey but is certainly less visually appealing than the 8600 and 8900 I’ve reviewed already. The back still has the low-poly shape, which I do like. The stand has all the adjustment you’d expect, including height, tilt and swivel, although one thing I’d note is the monitor is pretty heavy, and the stand is pretty thin, so any side-to-side motion has the stand actively twisting. It isn’t a big deal, especially since there’s a VESA mount under the toolless mount anyway, but I thought it was worth noting. The foot is also pretty massive, spanning a large amount of desk space, and due to its design if your desk isn’t perfectly flat the monitor will rock – ask me how I know… Inputs wise you get two HDMI 2.0 ports – which does mean this can only do 144Hz over HDMI – and two DisplayPort 1.4 ports which can do the full 240Hz, plus a four port USB 3 hub, with the two yellow ports being for charging, and an audio-out jack. 

One thing to note is the on screen menu. It’s controlled by a joystick style switch on the back which is great, although it’s weirdly far behind the panel so it’s still pretty awkward to reach, and even stranger is the delay between first pushing the switch and the menu opening. It’s like 5 seconds. It’s a weirdly long time. Once you’re in it isn’t so bad, although it is on the slower side. Still, you have all the options you’d expect, including four overdrive options, and even “Smart MPRT Sync” which is their backlight strobing mode that, in this case, can be enabled alongside adaptive sync. That’s always nice to see as an option, although it isn’t a mode I’d recommend you actually use. I get a headache looking at that flicking, and it isn’t great for you, so personally I’ll be leaving that one off.

As for the panel itself, my first impressions are that it looks rather nice. It’s more than bright enough, and pretty vibrant too. Content plays well here, with the VA panel offering pretty deep blacks on the whole. It isn’t as nice as an OLED, but for this price there isn’t much competition there. The data from the SpyderX2 backs me up here, with 491 nits at peak, and a 5220:1 contrast ratio – although at lower brightness levels it’s actually even higher – over 6000:1 at 50% which is where I’d expect most people to be using this thing. Interestingly, uniformity was pretty off, with 17% less light in the bottom right corner – that’s basically 100 nits dimmer down there, which isn’t ideal. Happily, colour gamut coverage was excellent, with 95% coverage of the DCI P3 spectrum or 69% of Rec2020 – nice. Colour accuracy is top notch too, with a stunning DeltaE average of just 0.61, with the maximum only being 1.4 – well under the threshold of 2 we’re generally looking for. Wonderful!

As for response times – I should make it clear that the 0.5ms figure is likely a mistake. Admittedly it is a mistake they’ve made both on their own website and on the Amazon listing for this monitor, but it’s likely that it was a non-technical person filling in this info and it wasn’t checked before publishing (twice). This is the same mistake I… helped rectify… on their other monitor brand, AOC, a year or two ago. Hopefully they’ll rectify this one too, and install some company-wide policies to check the marketing claims they’ve been making since these monitors came out over a year ago now. Anyway, let’s take a look at some data! Starting with no overdrive, being a VA panel it’s on the slower side as always. It averages out to 7.4 milliseconds, or 135 hertz equivalent. That isn’t too bad for native panel performance, if this were a 144Hz monitor.. Switching to the first overdrive mode, “Fast” that improves things to 6.8 milliseconds, or 146 hertz equivalent. The next mode up, “Faster” drops it pretty significantly to 5.5 milliseconds on average, or 181 hertz, but that’s still pretty far from the actual refresh rate. Let’s see if the highest mode, “Fastest” can save things and… oh.. Oh no it can’t. If you ONLY look at the initial response time, then yeah it’s plenty fast – just 2.4 milliseconds or 422 hertz – but that’s ignoring the additional 3.4 milliseconds of horrendous overshoot time that’s included. 

For some context, here is what moving objects look like on this panel with no overdrive – it’s a long, smeary mess, especially from darker shades. Now here is with the max overdrive on. You still get MULTIPLE frames of ghosting, but now those frames are inverse ghosting, which is arguably worse to look at. So it seems like the panel can’t keep up with the refresh rate, at least at 240Hz. Really this feels like a 165Hz panel that has been overclocked. That doesn’t mean the gaming experience isn’t any good – in fact in a game like Helldivers 2 it was a pretty phenomenal experience. The deep blacks make for really immersive viewing, and the insanely tight 1000R curve to it has quite the immersing effect too. It’s still plenty smooth enough for that sort of game, although I did also test it in Rainbow Six Siege and found it decent, but not quite fast enough to call that a great experience. I am happy to report that the input latency was spot on though at around half the refresh rate, which is exactly what you want to see.

The true selling point here really is the price tag. This is selling for right around £400, at least in the UK and at the time of filming. I think Amazon has it at more like £430, but still, that’s like £200 cheaper than almost any other reputable 32” 1440p high refresh rate display, and even more for a 240Hz 32” panel. For that kind of money, I can easily eschew the slow response times – especially since it’s perfectly fine for any genre, up to non-competitive FPS games. Sure, it isn’t quite as good a 240Hz monitor as, perhaps, an IPS or especially an OLED, but for the price, and for what else you get, I can’t argue anything other than it’s a stunning deal right now.