Philips EVNIA 27M2N8500 Review – INSANE VALUE 360Hz QD-OLED!

While Philips still don’t have the knack for naming monitors well, this 27M2N8500 sure is built and priced well! This £500 monitor is designed like a stylish office monitor, and yet offers a 1440p 360 hz QD-OLED panel, all for less money than some ultra high refresh rate IPS monitors – Asus I’m looking at you. This thing is easily £100 less than any other comparable option, so let’s take a look at it to see if they’ve had to cut a whole bunch of corners to meet that price, or this is just the deal of the decade. Let’s start with a look around the thing. Philips’ EVNIA line offers an unusual – but welcomed – take on gaming monitor styling. With a white backing – only accented by the silver metal components like the stand, and of course Philips’ Ambiglow that we’ll come back to in a second – and a squared design, I personally really quite like it. It’s modern, stylish and I do like the lighter design. The stand itself even has a nice marbled effect on the base, which is 35% recycled plastics – a nice thing to see for sure. You don’t have much in the way of branding, save for a logo on the side of the stand, and two on the edges of the chin bar at the front. The stand does have all the adjustability you’d expect, height, tilt and swivel, although no rotation for portrait mode. Despite the funky fin mounting solution you do get a VESA mount adapter in the box, should you want to not use this stand. 

I said I’d come back to Ambiglow, so here goes. For those that don’t know, Ambiglow is Philips’ backlighting tech. It’s individual RGB LEDs built into the perimeter of the backing panel that project light outwards, and if your monitor is up against a wall you get a cool screen-extending effect. There are a bunch of modes, including video and audio following modes. While I personally don’t use Ambiglow on my EVNIA 8600 as I use multiple displays and they don’t back straight onto a wall, I know a lot of people really like this, so to have this included here can definitely be seen as at least a small value-add on an already great value monitor. While we’re back here I should mention IO is two HDMI 2.1 ports and one DisplayPort 1.4 port, along with a two port USB hub with the yellow port being for charging devices. You do also have both AMD Freesync Premium Pro and NVIDIA GSYNC certification. The on screen menu is controlled by a joystick style switch on the back, and the menu itself has all the options you’d expect, including a whole bunch of OLED care options. Stuff like pixel orbiting which uses the extra pixels in the panel to shift the whole image left, right, up and down slightly, or screen saver which dims the display if there’s no movement after a couple minutes. There are now also a bunch of others, like boundary dimming, thermal protection and multi logo protection, although it seems by default most of these are actually disabled, which is a little surprising. On the note of burn-in, I’ve been using the EVNIA 8600 QD-OLED for well over a year now, and I still have absolutely no burn-in, even on full screen mid grey shades, there’s nothing. Not even a hint. 

As for this panel, as I said this is a 1440p, 360 Hz, quantum dot OLED panel, and my god it’s beautiful. It’s vibrant, rich, and bright – despite only actually outputting 250 nits. It’s deceptively bright, and for content consumption, man this is great. Colours pop, and that’s confirmed with the data from the SpyderX2 which reported 99% coverage of DCI P3 and 83% of Rec2020, 250 nits of peak brightness and an infinite contrast ratio, and an excellent 0.77 average DeltaE. In fact, the monitor does come with an admittedly more limited than usual colour calibration report that shows these come pre-calibrated from the factory. That’s a pretty nice thing to have for sure. To the eye this is just beautiful as well, it’s perfect for content consumption, and I’d wager it’s a great content creation experience too. That vibrant palette, and the accuracy, means this lends itself to a bit of Blender, Photoshop or Resolve for sure. 

As for gaming, starting with the response times, as you’d expect for an OLED the response times are functionally instant. Actually slightly faster than OSRTT can capture, so all good there. There isn’t an adaptive brightness limiter on this thing either, it’s just capped at 250 nits the whole time (unless you opt for HDR, in which case I think it can peak at 400 nits). Input lag is spot on too at right around half the refresh rate, so when you combine that with the instant response times, obviously this is an excellent gaming experience. For FPS games the fast reactions and incredibly smooth 360 Hz refresh rate means you can see enemies quicker, track them more smoothly, and at least in theory win more. This display shifts the bottleneck onto you entirely, which I think is exactly what you want. You want your gear to be an order of magnitude better than you are, and I’d argue that’s what this thing is. For something like racing games it’s excellent too – I think I personally prefer an ultrawide here to get that cockpit style view, but damn this thing is fast, smooth and responsive. It’s genuinely a joy to game on.

This is a pretty un-complicated display really. It’s stylish, fast, responsive, vibrant and sharp. To me that makes the pricing discussion a whole lot easier. This thing is right around £500 – which is the same price good 1440p IPS monitors were a couple years ago, let alone 360 Hz QD-OLEDs. While that is of course still a pretty premium price tag, for what you’re getting it’s hard to argue this isn’t anything other than an excellent value. There really aren’t any corners cut – this feels physically like a premium display, the stand is solid, the materials are pretty nice, and the Ambiglow is a nice touch too. If you’re after a new 1440p 27 inch display and have this kind of cash to spare, this is one hell of a display. It’s damn close in terms of usage experience to the Sony M10S for less than HALF the price, and a good £300-400 less than comparable options from the likes of LG. I really like this, and I’d even go so far as to say this is my new favourite monitor. Great job Philips!