Philips Brilliance 275P4VYKEB Review

We’ve been busy rating and reviewing 4k screens here at PCMUK but it turns out we’re behind the times.  Philips put out a 5k monitor at the end of 2016 capable of displaying a massive 5120 x 2800 pixels across it’s 27″ display space.  Make no mistake, that is a lot of pixels and way beyond what most of us are looking for from a monitor right now.

In fact if you are interested in one of these the first thing you will have to do is check the compatibility of your graphics card.  The sheer number of pixels that need to be controlled means that most cards simply aren’t up to the job, you’ll need to hook up two DisplayPort cables for a start!

But if you are in the market for a 5k screen and feel you have a need for such a high quality screen (and have the money to spend) then the Brilliance will be one of the few options you have right now.  At some point in the future these ultra high definition screens will become more affordable and we’ll all have the GPU power to run one, but for now, these are a specialist item.

We’d love to hear from you if you own, or buy one, let us know in the comments!  Why did you go for 5k?

Build Quality

The monitor is fairly standard in features, it has a fairly large border and a rather robust look to it. It isn’t on the elegant end of the scale in my view. Connectivity is provided by two DisplayPort sockets and you’ll need to hook up both to a compatible graphics card. Check that yours is going to work!

Headphones and speakers are included, and unusually for a PC monitor, a webcam and microphone. I’m not sure why the designers felt the need to include that, I’d rather have a replacable and moveable webcam attached to my PC, I can’t imagine the inclusion of a webcam is really on the mind of early adopters looking at 5k!

Full movement is provided, height, tilt and swivel adjustments are all there. You can even rotate into portrait mode.

Performance

The Brilliance 275P4VYKEB uses a PLS screen, think of it as Samsung’s own version of IPS. It has the same benefits, superior colour accuracy and wider viewing angles compared to TN, but it also had slower response times – quoted as 8ms. Generally speaking we recommend 5ms or less for gamers so this starts to creep towards the slower end. But then this was never designed to be a gamer’s monitor and, with current technology, gaming at 5k isn’t going to be practical anyway. Given that we will be seeing a number of 144hz, adaptive sync 4K monitors hitting the market in 2017 it might make more sense to look at these if gaming is a priority.

Thankfully Windows 10 does a good job with scaling, ensuring that text is still readable. You will find menu items on the smaller side however so be warned if you prefer your interfaces to be big and bold. Most should find it comfortable to use however. Professional testers have reported back colour accuracy, uniformity as a plus point, but let down by brightness uniformity. OVerall the positives outweigh the negative and once you’ve worked on a 5k screen you’ll find it hard to go back!