Pro Display XDR Who?? Philips 5K Display Review (27E3U7903)

This rather magnificent looking thing costs the same as Apple’s Pro Display XDR….’s stand. Yeah, that £1000 ‘Pro’ stand? You could buy this entire monitor for the same money. And man are you getting a lot more for your money here. This is a 5K – that’s 5120 by 2880, 70 Hz display with a full dock worth of ports on the back, a built in webcam, a presence sensor to automatically sleep and wake your system when you’re actually using it, oh and stunning colours – I’m talking the widest colour gamut coverage I’ve ever seen. And all that for the same price as Apple’s stand. Let’s take a closer look at this thing and see if it’s actually worth your hard-earned cash!

This is the Philips 27E3U7903 – as ever Philips always picks the catchiest names… – a 5120 by 2880 IPS panel with a 70 hertz refresh rate housed in a rather chunky, but pretty aesthetically similar to the Pro Display package. The stand has a very chunky almost obelisk look to it, and the panel itself is like an inch thick. This is a hefty looking (although surprisingly not all that heavy, certainly not as heavy as it looks) display for sure. An important note is that while the square foot is all metal – with an infinite swivel plate built in – the back stand isn’t, that’s plastic. The stand has all the adjustments – the swivel I already mentioned, of course tilt, height adjust, and even rotation into portrait mode… BOTH WAYS! That’s a first for me I think, and especially confusing because thanks to the built in webcam block, this isn’t exactly easy to arrange amongst your other displays, and I can’t exactly imagine why you’d want to. Surely this thing is your centrepiece display? Anyway, that’s an option, should you want it. You can of course VESA mount it too – with the adapter coming in the box FOR FREE! Shocking, I know.

IO is amazing, on the left there are all the video inputs, one HDMI 2.1 port and three USB C ports (which are actually Thunderbolt 4 ports). Two are for video, with one offering 96 watts of USB PD power, and the other being more like 15 watts, and the last being an “upstream” port, meaning if you’re using HDMI you can connect to that one so the USB hub on the other side still works, and the camera connects too. In the middle is the power cable, which is a bit of a weird one. This is a permanently attached pigtail that’s actually a kettle lead receptacle. You plug your regular kettle lead into this, as if it was a port on the back of the monitor. Funky! The right has another Thunderbolt 4 USB C port, a two port USB A hub with the yellow port for charging your devices, and a gigabit ethernet RJ45 port too. There’s also a headphone jack on the bottom, and two 5 watt speakers built in, which aren’t bad, but if you’re spending a grand on a monitor, please spend £100 on a nice set of bookshelf speakers too. Please. 

Strangely for such a nice display, the way you change settings on this thing is with separated buttons on the bottom edge, and the on screen menu is noticeably low resolution. It’s fine, you’ll probably only change settings when you set it up then leave it as-is, but it’d be nice for this to be a little easier to use, and nicer to look at. You can use Philips’ desktop app to change the settings if you’d rather though, and that’s obviously a much nicer way to do it. In here you’ve got a whole bunch of settings, starting with the presence detection, which can either run with Windows 11’s built in feature, or manually with four levels of sensing. The Picture settings are pretty dense, both in quantity and understanding how to use them. You get options for HDR, Tone Mapping and even Local Dimming, but those are greyed out. I have to assume you have to enable HDR in Windows for those to become enabled. You do get a whole bunch of picture modes under the title “SmartImage”, and even overdrive modes under “SmartResponse”. We’ll come back to those later. The colour modes are plentiful too, you can set it by colour temperature, user defined RGB values, or by colour space, including both D50 and regular versions of DCI P3 and AdobeRGB, as well as Rec 709 and Rec 2020. Fancy, I know! There are also picture-in-picture options, audio controls, and controls for the USBs and webcam too, namely if you want AI assistance or not. 

Speaking of the webcam, that little notch on the top is where you’ll find it, the built in microphones, and the presence sensor. I am happy to report this does have a physical privacy cover, with options for webcam off, mic on, or both off, or of course both on. As for the quality, let’s have a look… Considering this thing is a pretty thick and chunky brick on top here, the quality of the webcam is really very disappointing. This would be poor for a thin and light laptop, let alone a desktop webcam. It’s grainy, and even with the ‘AI’ features doing pan and zooming and a bit of visual improvement, this just isn’t good. At least the microphone is ok, although it’s pretty harsh, often clipping even after turning the volume down. Oh, and the whole “AI” focus thing, while it’s much faster than the built-in Windows AI one (check the review of the Windows for ARM Acer laptop out to see what I mean there), it’s a little too fast and honestly makes me feel a little queasy watching the footage back. 

Of course you aren’t necessarily buying this thing purely as a webcam, you’re buying it for the glorious 5K IPS panel in the middle! That’s where the money went, clearly, because dayum it looks good. This is undeniably sharper than a 4K 27 inch panel – which is already ludicrously sharp! I can see why Apple likes this 218 pixels-per-inch density, it’s hard to describe just how crisp this looks, especially up close. When you pair that with the panel’s incredible brightness and colour profile, you get a phenomenal visual experience. This is a content creator’s dream display, for sure. What makes it even better is that it is stunningly accurate. Philips includes an incredibly detailed factory calibration report in the box, stating not only a sub-one DeltaE average in the sRGB mode, but 100 percent coverage of the AdobeRGB, and 99.88 percent coverage of the DCI P3 spectrums. In my own testing, my SpyderX2 reported 100% coverage of all spectrums, save for Rec2020, where I’m seeing a record 88% coverage. That is the widest colour gamut coverage I’ve tested. Accuracy, even just in the colour temperature mode (rather than the specific and calibrated colour spectrum modes) is an astonishing 0.48 DeltaE average, with no results above two at all – not even close. Brightness is also fantastic at just shy of 700 nits, and a little over 2000:1 contrast ratio. That part isn’t perfect, an OLED would be nicer there, but you’d struggle to get such a wide colour gamut from that. This is an incredible display to look at and use, there’s no other way to say it.

I do briefly want to mention the response times, purely for the sake of motion clarity for stuff like video editing. You want to make sure the display can at least keep up with the content you’re seeing, but unfortunately in its default mode (ie overdrive off) this can’t. I got an average of 16 milliseconds, with a number of transitions taking a fair bit longer – over 20 milliseconds in fact. That’s not good. Setting overdrive to the first setting, “Fast”, you get a better average at 14 milliseconds, which is in line with the 70 hertz refresh rate, but not by much. The next setting, “Faster”, is better, with the average dropping to just 9 milliseconds, or 11.8 milliseconds if you include the overshoot, although the fact there is even overshoot here is pretty disappointing. This certainly isn’t a 70 hertz panel, it can barely keep up at 60 hertz! The top overdrive mode, “Fastest”, is just laughably bad. The initial response time (as in if you ignore the overshoot time) does drop to just 6.9 milliseconds, which sounds great on paper, but in practice is unusably bad for overshoot. Set this to “Fast”, I guess. I wish Philips had refined these modes a little more so 60 FPS footage would actually run smoothly here. 

Of course, while a Windows machine absolutely can run this just fine – both over HDMI and USB 4/Thunderbolt 4 – this isn’t exactly aimed at Windows users. This is a MacOS resolution, so what’s this like to use with a Mac? Well happily my friend came over with his M3 Macbook Pro so we could find out, and the short answer is it’s fantastic. For those that don’t understand why Mac users desperately crave a 5K panel over a 4K one, I’ll like to an excellent (and concise) video by Kier Darby in the cards above to explain, but the long as short of it is Apple scales their UI elements like text and icons based on an expected pixel density of at least 218 PPI. 4K 27 inch displays are around 163 PPI, so your choices are to have everything be larger on screen (and therefore less sharp AND less screen real estate) or have the system render at 5K and downsample, but that looks horrible because it’s not a one-to-one scaling factor. Both of those options suck, so we’re back to this, a 5K display. This means icons and windows on the built-in display are the same size as on the 5K, and the same level of sharpness and clarity. That’s a neat trick for sure. 

For actually using the display for work, be that creative, programming or even just spreadsheets (although the latter feels like a waste of this thing’s beauty), this is incredible. The mixture of sharpness, vibrancy and richness makes it an absolute joy to use. The accuracy means you don’t need to worry when editing videos or photos, or designing a website, that the colours you’re seeing aren’t what everyone else will see, and the sheer brightness means even in bright environments you’ll still see everything just fine. As a content creator myself, I really like this thing. Personally I’m good with my Philips EVNIA 8600 QD-OLED as I do like to game from time to time too, but knowing this exists, and is amazing. This is in line with the surprising number of other 5K displays on the market – at around £1000 it’s exactly the same as the others, save for the Asus ProArt one that lists itself at more like £750 instead, although only HDR500 versus HDR600 on this, so maybe this has a slightly better backlight. Anyway, if you’re a Mac user in need of a great looking high DPI display, I can happily say this one is great. If you’re a Windows user, get a 4K panel for a quarter of the price. Maybe half the price if you want the same sort of colours.