Short
This is the Philips Evnia 42M2N8900, a big mouthful that model number. It’s a 42-inch OLED panel with a 4K resolution, a 138Hz refresh rate, and a very large contrast ratio. Being an OLED panel, the blacks here look nice and inky, while the colours pop against darker backgrounds. It’s an absolute beast of a monitor and can produce a stunning image for gaming and also for watching media. It’s perfect for those wanting a screen for single-player story-driven titles over eSports gaming, but whatever you throw at it, it’s going to pop. It supports HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 and has an ambiglow feature for the surround.
Full Review
There’s no hiding the fact that this monitor is an absolute unit, and on my desk it looks a little garish. Now I know I’ve got it in front of my two daily drivers, but even still, if they were not there I’m not sure it would suit my space. It’s an OLED panel which makes super contrasty games like Ori And The Will Of The Wisps look stunning it has tiny bezels and a really nice stand made from recycled materials and it’s white across the back to help with that ambiglow reflection it has, although I wouldn’t rate the ambiglow really. It’s nowhere near as bright as those LED strips from Philips or Govee that react to your screen now. It’s called the Philips Evnia 42M2N8900, bit of a mouthful that model number and probably won’t be said again in this video, but let’s check it out.
The Philips Evnia screen here is a 42-inch 4K OLED panel that can pack a punch when it comes to gaming performance. Not only do you get the added benefits OLED gives when it comes to motion clarity and blurring, but you’ve also got a refresh rate of 138hz. Why not the standard 144Hz like other gaming panels produce I’m not sure, but it’s still pretty decent when it comes to motion blur performance. Philips has also treated users to full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 so you console gamers out there can fully experience this screen at 120Hz. And what more, you can actually lock the HDMI ports individually to 120Hz too. Speaking of ports around the back you’ve also got your DisplayPort, a USB hub and also power. The screen itself has a matte finish with some kind of anti-glare film across the front which works quite nicely actually and did help wit the glare from my window somewhat. However to get the most out of this monitor, get as much light out of the room as possible just so those colours pop even more!
The screen can also produce an HDR image as it’s compatible with HR10. However, there is no DisplayHDR certification with this panel which is a little strange that they have not been granted the certification given the style of monitor this is. However, it’s still good to know it has HDR compatibility and a maximum brightness of 480nits in HDR, though it falls to around 180nits in SD mode. There will be more on this in a moment. You’ve also got your adaptive sync on your refresh rate which does run from 48 – 138Hz which is probably why this monitor’s max refresh is that, though there’s no G-Sync here. You’ve got FreeSync Premium though if you’re running your AMD graphics cards. Unfortunately, I’ve got a 4070Ti in my main rig, and it worked absolutely fine for me so adaptive sync here is good enough I would say and didn’t really feel l ike I was missing out due to not having the G-Sync included. There is no real motion reduction technology in play here, making it somewhat a basic OLED panel, and to be honest with you, aimed at the more casual gamer as opposed to eSports enthusiast, but it still did a decent job at controlling motion, and I didn’t notice any kind of inverse ghosting when running through a UFO test, though there is still some standard ghosting present. It has a VESA ClearMR 8000 certification which is a method in which VESA measure motion clarity in a panel, and the 8000 level is roughly midtable, so some could say it’s not the best, but it’s not the worst by far. However, saying this if you’re the type of gamer who hits the eSports titles hard, this might not be the monitor for you. It’s definitely more suited towards a more casual single-player title gamer nad maybe some light multiplayer, especially as well as this thing is so damn large on a desk.
Gaming on this screen however is a superb experience. The colours being an OLED panel absolutely pops and playing through some Black Myth: Wukong looked just a bit breathtaking. The blacks are super inky and smooth enough to pick out details in combat. I also tried some Vermintide 2 too because that game is notoriously dark, and again, the glow from lights and fire against the inky blacks just looked stunning. Inside of the Evnia’s Game Mode menu, there is something called a Dynamic DarkBoost which essentially brightens dark areas inside of games. I stuck this on Level 1 just to give them a bit of a lift. And of course, I had to try some Overwatch 2 didn’t I, but I must say that one of this panel’s greatest strengths is probably its greatest weakness when it comes to competitive games like Overwatch 2 and that’s its size. Tracking enemies zooming from left to right, like an annoying Lucio for example became quite tough at 42-inches, and I would have much preferred a smaller monitor for this. It did though look pretty smooth and again the colours popped, especially from the energy weapons within the game. Be warned though, there is a setting to help mitigate burn in which includes pixel orbiting and a pixel refresh every four hours. There is also a brightness limited on the panel too depending on what’s being used. If you’re on a browser all day for example, this can really help with preventing the static parts of the browser from damaging the screen. Of course, you do have a warranty with the screen, but who wants to faff around with that when there are settings here that can help.
As I’ve mentioned the menu already, everything is controlled with a small joystick on the bottom rear of the monitor, though its position is a little awkward to get to if you’re looking straight on. It requires a bit of a stretch to hit functions. Don’t expect much from the OSD though as there’s only a few settings for picture quality, including some presets and also some minor game settings. Nothing that screams eSports or gaming really. I did stick to the Standard Picture profile, turned the white balance to 6500k and turned on the sRGB mode, but unfortunately, this is where the panel fell down for me somewhat compared to other reviews. And yes I did cheat somewhat and check out how others have fared with the panel because I was shocked at my findings. Shout out to TotallyDubbed by the way who I spoke to on Twitter to find out their exact settings for this panel to see if I could get my colour accuracy down to their level. Anyway, let’s talk about some stats.
Looking at my gamuts, after a calibration I managed to get 100% of the sRGB colour gamut, but it did fall down on AdobeRGB coming in at 89%, PE fared better at 95% and NTSC came in at 87%. So somewhat varied there. Brightness and contrast were superb, with SD mode at 100% brightness coming in at 182.6 nits of brightness with a contrast ratio of 4,270:1 which was marvellous to see and a white point of 6,400. Colour uniformity at 100% brightness saw some hot spot issues all the way down the left hand side, while at 50% brightness, things looked a lot more even across the panel and luminance uniformity at 100% brightness was fine, no issues there.
Now this is where things got a little bit strange for me because colour accuracy according to my Datacolor Spyder Elite was off. And this is where I cheated a bit and checked out other reviews on YouTube because I saw people were getting Delta-E averages of around 1.4. My Delta-E average, the best I could get was around 6.8. Okay, so let me explain bare with me a bit here. My first test I ran pre-calibration in Standard Picture Mode with sRGB off, gave me a Delta-E average of 7.26. My second test, I ran post-calibration again with sRGB off gave me an average of 6.23, so getting better. However, my third test, with sRGB on, my white balance at 6500k, and at 50% brightness this time, gave me an average score of 8.10. So who knows if I’ve been super unlucky with the panel lottery here? My fourth test because I thought at this point what the hell, was run in the Game 1 image mode, gave me a colour accuracy of 11.43. Go figure. I used my Datacolor Spyder on my MSI panels here, and no problems, so I know I haven’t got broken equipment. I just don’t know why these Philips Evnia monitors, which have been the second I’ve tested now, give me such an issue with measuring colour.
But even with the downfall with the colour accuracy, I still had a fantastic time with this monitor and found my single-player games really immersive, and really gave me a bit of a fresh perspective on how good some of them can look on an OLED panel. Looking at you Ori. The biggest drawback for me unfortunately being a desk monitor is its size. Yes it’s fantastic playing on an OLED panel this big, but it is a big downfall for me and Overwatch 2 and tracking enemies, Give me my 27-inch screen back any day for that. But still, Philips have done a great job here for sure. Googling the model number has given me a range of prices from around £770 on the likes of eBay, all the way up to just over £1,000 so please do your research. It’s what I would call an entry-level OLED panel, but even entry-level can still be superb.
