Gadgetory

welcome back to hadron box today we're looking at what really is a ridiculous product the Philips momentum 43 which also has a crazy product name you might have seen which I'll put on the screen now rather than trying to say it and stuff it up every time anyway the momentum 43 is a 43 inch 4k HDR monitor it's not a TV according to Philips but a monitor so apparently they think some people interested in such a massive display for their PC this thing is pretty big it's been sitting in my hallway for a while now so I figured it's about time I get to reviewing it and I'll talk a bit more about the site later but first a couple of important specs this 43 3840 by 2160 pound uses VA technology with a quantum dot film and it's sports display hgr 1000 certification plus you get adaptive sync a cave routing through a rather narrow 48 to 60 Hertz range with a 48 Hertz minimum we're not getting low framerate compensation or LFC and as a result we're also not getting the full benefit of free sync it's also the reason why the momentum 43 is not advertised as a free sync to HDR panel it fails the certification process for free sync too as it doesn't support LFC this is despite display boasting full display hgl 1000 compliance the lack of free sync to an LLC is a bit of a bummer considering Ferb's is positioning this display as more of an entertainment or gaming focused unit you'll be fine watching hgr movies are playing console games but PC game is a a bit left behind compared to the best 4k gaming displays out there this monitor is better suited to non PC usage for another reason as well it uses a non-standard sub pixel structure which causes a bit of text blurriness in Windows it's definitely not the clearest 4k display I've seen and this doesn't have anything to do with its size as the pixel density here matches that of a 27-inch 1440p monitor the BGR instead of RGB sub pixel array is a non-issue outside of viewing text and documents in a PC operating system though so gaming is fine for example while Philips does say this as a gaming or entertainment display there are some odd design choices they go against this marketing push the battle only has a single HDMI port so those with multiple console perhaps a console in a 4k blu-ray player can't plug in both at the same time without a switch or adapter but then there are two display ports one full-size in one mini along with a USB see input using DP alt mode these are features you'd normally associate with the PC monitor rather than an entertainment focus display with a wide 2 prong stand the momentum 43 looks more like a modern TV than a traditional monitor the display is of average thickness with average bezels nothing amazing for a monitor of this size then the use of basic plastic on the front and rear keeps everything looking nice and minimal in choosing the sort of design the momentum could be used for a number of applications without looking out of place it could be a TV for console gaming it could be a large office monitor or it could just be a monstrous PC gaming display along the bottom edge you'll find Phillips and B glow lighting which is basically just two RGB LED strips and some processing software they gets these strips to mimic the average colors currently on the display in a dark room with white walls this provides pleasant ambient lighting in some situations and it works quite well it's both responsive and accurate what's being shown in fact asada may be it lighting it's worth experimenting with and it's definitely more useful than just a basic RGB strip of course it can also be fully disabled and in fact comes disabled by default if you want a more traditional display experience as the on-screen display Philips does include a directional toggle on the display itself for easy navigation but even easier than that is the remote they include the remote is very basic and is mainly used for changing inputs and the volume of the built-in speakers but it can also be used to flick through the on-screen settings and that certainly helped for calibrating the display plus if you end up using the momentum 43 as a TV the remote is basically an essential inclusion it shouldn't come as a surprise though that the stand is very limited in that it only provides tilt adjustment I would have been amazed if it included any other adjustments so if you want to mount the screen higher up or an angle you'll need to purchase a 200 by 200 visa mount which is compatible with the display this size and weight obviously one of the big draw cards of the momentum 43 is its size and this thing is certainly enormous for gaming I use a 34 inch Acer predator X 30 for ultra wide which is already pretty wide as it is but the momentum 43 is a good 10 centimetres wider obviously being significantly taller as it's a 16:9 panel for productivity use I found the momentum to be impractical for most tasks it does have a few things going for it a pixel density equivalent to a 27-inch 1440p display means you don't have to mess around with display scaling to read text at a typical desk viewing distance it also gives you plenty of screen real estate equivalent to for 21.5 inch 1080p monitors in a 2x2 grid so you can snap apps to each corner and view four windows at once while still keeping things nice and visible something you really can't do with a 32 inch 4k monitor or smaller but my main problem with this monitor for productivity tasks is that no work mode ever feels comfortable to use if you're just viewing one massive 4k window that's a waste of screen real estate and in many apps like Photoshop your eyes will be dining around the screen to taskbar on the left and right sides in a split screen view because the panel is flat the edges are far away from your eyes and it's just not a great experience compared to a standard dual screen setup where you angle the screens for optimal viewing of each one and then with one window in each corner nothing important is in the center of the screen and the center is the most easily viewable part where the size really shines is for entertainment which is exactly what Philips markets this display for when you track a 43 inch screen at arm's reach on a desk its truly enormous occupying a massive amount of your field of view compared to a standard 21:9 ultra-wide monitor the major advantages in its height the momentum 43 just engulfed your vision where an ultra wide doesn't really provide the same level of vertical immersion that said in a lot of games you'll have to adjust the field of view and the HUD positioning to ensure the main action is still in the center of the display I felt the best use of the momentum 43 is a PC gaming display was in games the delay to adjust these things so that you're not just viewing a blown-up image but instead of getting you know more peripheral vision both horizontally and vertically not every game allows you to do that though or can do so without a fisheye effect so it can be a bit of a mixed bag when I personally use a 43 inch display for gaming well probably not considering my existing 21:9 space is actually useful as a Productivity monitor and the exercise of the 43 inch momentum doesn't always lead to better results in games but I can definitely see the appeal for a mess display like this for some games though it's gonna be more of a nice thing aside from the size the other key reason to buy the momentum 43 is its HD our capabilities in particular display HDR 1000 certification what we're getting here on the spec sheet is actually pretty good as far as monitors are concerned we often see companies slapping HDR onto their monitor boxes with that tackling even one of the three key HDR pillars but in this case Philips has made an effort to provide an HDR experience that exceeds SDR and that shows with display HDR 1000 certification as you can see in the checklist we get over 700 nits of sustain brightness and 1000 nits peak so Philips has smashed that target we also see an increased color space of 145 percent srgb a 10 bit panel through FRC and local dimming however the bigger mission here is an F Ald or full array local dimming backlight the momentum 43 only features edgelet dimming in 32 zones so unfortunately this panel doesn't meet everything in my HDI checklist and let's talk about the edge lip dimming for a moment here 32 zones is larger than what you see with Samsung's basic HDR panels for example but it's still nowhere near the level of the 384 so an FA LD backlight you get with a soos and Asus chasing hgr monitors the big issue with edgelet dimming is it can't show bright objects in the center of the display without producing a noticeable glow that extends from the edges of the display to the bright object va is excellent native contrast helps mitigate this issue somewhat compared to IPS displays but the glow is still present and in a dark viewing environment it's pretty noticeable each loading zone also appears a little slow to respond compared to other HDR display as I've used while I could slam Philips more for using a dilute local dimming the reality is this monitors HDR mode does provide an improvement over SDR because it comfortably provides two of the three key HDR pillars in brightness and color space and in a lot of situations the edgelet backlight does help improve the dynamic range and contrast or sense but of course it does depend on what you're viewing so it's not like the HDR experience is awful because it lacks an F alt backlight it's definitely better than SDR but the experience isn't as good as with a proper HDR display that takes every box so I guess I'd have to class the momentum 43 as an HDR light display something along those lines the good news is that the areas of hgr that the momentum 43 does support like brightness and color space it supports really well the panel can comfortably sustain over 900 minutes of brightness regardless of the window size and while peak brightness doesn't quite hit a thousand it's the nine hundred and thirty five minutes my unit can produce is absolutely blinding at a desk viewing distance when you're not experiencing the glow issues from the edge of it backlight we're also getting contrast ratio over forty thousand to one in a best-case scenario which is pretty great and as for color space 97% DCI p3 coverage means the display can show a significantly higher number of colors than the basic srgb which leads to more vibrant imagery in the HDR mode as we're looking at a VA panel here I wasn't expecting fantastic response times Philips claims a formula second-grader grade transition which is well below what we typically see from VA panels in practice so my immediate thought was there probably fudging that number however this particular 43 inch VA panel is actually one of the best VA s for response times I recorded an average grade gray response of 6.5 3 milliseconds with relatively consistent performance form rises and falls this is well below the sixteen point seven millisecond refresh window of the 60 Hertz panel and no single transition comes even close to exceeding it we're not quite in the ballpark of a good T yet but this is definitely a very good result for a VA with your sort of performance the momentum 43 will be well suited to running out 120 Hertz but unfortunately we're cap to just 60 Hertz I should also mention here that we're using an off overdrive setting all the other overdrive settings introduce overshoot but the performance from the off mode is actually still pretty good so it's not a bad mode to use at all input lag isn't as fantastic with the momentum 43 using our standard test conditions which includes the display in a calibrated state running over DisplayPort at a native resolution with a low input lag mode enabled I measured lag of approximately 34 milliseconds and you can add on another 10 to 15 milliseconds when switching the low input lag mode off this is a very poor input lag result making this monitor all of the slowest we've tested I did see some other reviews claiming input lag that's much better than this however I couldn't replicate those results of any configuration of settings I tried so not sure what's the case there in terms of SDR brightness and contrast the display tops out at around 560 nits and delivers a native contrast ratio of around 4500 to one although you can use the dynamic backlight in the SDR moe to increase that contrast ratio further SDR color performance out of the box is disappointing for a number of reasons its default state the display delivers an uncalibrated color gamut so standard srgb imagery is stretched out to a wider gamut approximately a DCI p3 which leads to over saturation we're looking at our saturation in color checker charts this is quite evident and is the cause of the high average Delta ease default white balance is also a little off the screen appears to have a slight red tint when viewing whites and while the average Delta II is reasonable in grayscale there's a few issues with the CCT and gamma curves Philips does include an sRGB mode and this tightens up the gamut to srgb which solves the saturation issue however the issue with the srgb mode is it doesn't allow you to change the brightness level so if you want any accurate colors you're stuck with a very high 417 it's of brightness which is quite frankly a ridiculous restriction that makes the srgb mode completely useless no one in a typical usage environment is going to be running this monitor at 417 nits if you could change the brightness it would be a great option for those that want knee accuracy without a full calibration but locking the brightness slider is just a dumb oversight or choice on the part of Philips if you want to get accurate color performance out of the momentum 43 you have no choice but to perform a full calibration using something like spectra Cal's camera and five as there's no other setting in the OSD that allows you to restrict the display to srgb the SDR usage the good news is the panel is highly calibrated and every aspect of its performance can be corrected to an elite standard with that sacrificing brightness or contrast ratio though as you need to software profile to do so not every app will pay attention to these Corrections the final area of performance I wanted to explore is uniformity and it's perhaps the area I was most disappointed in my Philip's momentum 43 is not particularly uniform and it's visible immediately when viewing any solid colors there's an obvious dark shadow around the edges of the monitor which basically causes a vignette effect this is really disappointing for a high-end display or this size you're getting entry-level uniformity here and this is something you really can't correct so the one thing I haven't mentioned up until this point is the price and that's largely because this is a niche product those looking to buy something like the momentum 43 will be specifically after what this display provides and really there's not a lot of competition there are a few other 43 inch 4k displays out there but the momentum 43 is the only one that is hgr capable and is certified for display HDR 1000 anyway the momentum 43 is priced at nine hundred US dollars or fourteen hundred ozzie which is around 250 to 300 US dollars more than your basic 43 inch 4k IPS SDR display and there's typically retail for 600 to 650 u.s. the HDI provided by the momentum 43 is far from perfect but it still will deliver a much better experience than those basic 43 inch display so once a the higher price is worth it in that sense that said I'd really only recommend this monitor for those who want to use it for HDR gaming or movie playback the SDR mode has a few issues like a wider than standard color gamut that you can't easily correct and the uniformity issue makes desktop use with solid colors a bit of an eyesore those who just want a massive display for productivity for whatever reason are going to be better off with the $600 basic IPS equivalent but the bigger question is whether you should buy a 43 inch monitor like this at all as I mentioned earlier in this video I think this sort of size is impractical for productivity use those that want to multitask with side by side apps are better off with either an ultra wide display or multiple monitors so you can position them to better suit your field of view for PC gamers the momentum 43 is massive but if you're using it at a standard desk viewing distance you'll most often find games are just enlarged onto this huge screen rather than extend it to give you a better field of view for that reason I'd probably again recommend either an ultra wide display or say a 32 inch monitor which will present you with fewer issues and then for people wanting to use the momentum 43 more as a TV se for console gaming or movie watching I don't think it provides good value sure it is a 4k HDR display and has a remote but there are much better 4k HDR TV deals out there I'd recommend the 55 inch vizio P series which is actually a hundred dollars less than the momentum 43 fighting a larger screen an F Ald backlight for better HDR and similar brightness color space and contrast to the momentum and it has five HDMI ports not one so at the end of the day the Philips for momentum 43 is kind of left in no-man's land it's a fairly respectable displayed its own right it does a lot of things well and also has a few issues but I just don't see a use case for this class of display at this price it's basically a super niche product you'd only really consider it seriously if you had a specific reason to purchase a 43 inch monitor with display HDR 1004 most people I don't imagine they will have that specific reason luckily for Philips I have a 32 inch version from their new momentum series here in the office as well to test so look out for that on the channel soon I think it might be more useful to a wider audience but we'll see because I haven't actually unboxed it yet so I guess subscribe for that and more monitor reviews consider supporting us on patreon for access to our exclusive discord chat and I'll catch you in the next one