Philips 34M2C6500 Review – Budget QD-OLED 175Hz Ultra wide

If you’ve seen my favourite gaming monitor – the Philips EVNIA 8600 – you’ll know just how much I enjoy using it as my primary gaming monitor, but the big hitch is that it costs a whopping £600+. While that is a great deal, or at least I think so, that is still a lot of money for a gaming monitor. Luckily Philips will sell you the same panel with a slightly less premium feature set for, at least at the current on sale price, £450 – a whopping £150 less than my one. That sure sounds like a hell of a deal, so let’s dive in a little more to see if there’s a hidden reason you don’t want this otherwise incredibly impressive beast!

First, a look around. This is a 34 inch curved 21:9 panel, in a dark grey plastic shell. It has an adjustable stand (the same as the 8600, but a similar darker hue), and otherwise has the usual features like Ambiglow – although this is the first downgrade, only having three zones instead of four – and the feature clipping continues with the removal of the speakers no one should ever use, and lastly on the IO front, the 8600 came with a built in KVM where you could connect, say, a laptop over the type C port and have it be both the display and your keyboard and mouse connected to the USB A ports, then switch to DisplayPort and the peripherals switch to the USB B port. On this one, gone is the type C port, and two of the USB A ports, meaning you get just two HDMIs and one DisplayPort for video, and two port USB 3 hub instead. That’s it. The Type C port did have 90 watts of USB PD output too, but assuming you are using this with a gaming PC and not a USB C powered laptop, that won’t matter much to you, and for (at the time of filming) £150? That sounds like a pretty great tradeoff to me!

The only other difference I’ve noticed, which might just be with the firmware version this thing is on, is the OLED care settings and fan control. This thing does have the same settings the 8600 has – just pixel orbiting which uses the extra pixels built into the panel to shift the whole image up/down/left/right a couple pixels to try and even out static wear, screen saver which dims the display after a couple minutes of inactivity, and the pixel refreshes, but otherwise it’s missing a lot of the thermal and specialised dimming options that a bunch of the other QD-OLED’s I’ve tested in the last year or two include. That isn’t a big deal, but worth noting. Also, my 8600 has a built-in fan and a menu item to be able to control it, whereas this thing at very least doesn’t have the menu item, and to be honest the same as the 8600 I can’t hear a fan in here anyway. 

As for the panel, that is the exact same 175 hertz Samsung quantum dot OLED with a resolution of 3440 by 1440. This is a panel I’m very familiar with, and frankly it’s amazing. This thing is sharp, vibrant, rich and a real joy to look at. Watching content on it is a top notch experience, despite the low brightness. Thanks in part to the high gloss screen finish, and in part because the pixels are the things that emit the light itself, the 250 nits this thing outputs punches way above its weight. As you might expect, the contrast ratio is functionally infinite, while the colour gamut coverage is excellent. 99 percent PCI P3, 83 percent Rec2020, and an average DeltaE 1.32 which is excellent. You do get a colour calibration report in the box, although it is the most barebones one I’ve seen in a while, only reporting the accuracy. Still, the fact these are factory calibrated even at this price point is amazing!

I’ll flash up the response time results, but as always with OLED’s they are instant, and perfect. The joy of QD-OLED’s is they don’t have any adaptive brightness limiters, so it can do 250 nits across the full screen all day long, no matter the content. It can do more in HDR, but I really don’t get on with that and don’t exactly have the tools to test it, so I’ll leave that to those who do. I am also happy to report that after over two years of daily usage, I still don’t have any burn-in at all. The daily mini refreshes do an excellent job of making this perfectly even regardless of my hours and hours of usage. Latency is also spot on at around half the refresh rate, so exactly what you want to see.

As for the gaming experience, that is amazing. As I said this is the exact same panel as the one I’ve been using for over two years now, so I have the most experience possible to say just how good an experience this thing is. For racing games (hint hint), it’s wide and immersive, smooth and responsive, and my god does it suck you in. For FPS games, while it isn’t super high refresh rate, it’s more than fast and smooth enough to get you plenty of kills. This is the perfect one-size-fits-all beast, and if it’s not clear this is my favourite monitor for gaming, and for work. I really enjoy using it – or it’s bigger brother anyway. 

What gets me so excited about this thing is that it’s literally just my favourite monitor, but 25 percent off. The lack of speakers, a type C port and an Ambiglow zone feels like a very worthy justification for such a steep discount. While £450 is a fair chunk of change still, that isn’t that much of a premium over, say, an IPS ultrawide, and this thing is a big step up by comparison. Genuinely, get one while you can!