Philips 34B2U6603CH review: Ultrawide, ultra-sensible and very well connected

In most aspects of our daily lives, there's a lot to be said for simplicity. Indeed, if we gave most IT managers the choice between outfitting every employee's desk with multiple monitors, each spewing a spaghetti of cables, and a single, ultrawide monitor that does it all, we suspect that quite a few of them – budget-willing – would swiftly choose the latter. And to be quite honest, we wouldn't be surprised if many home workers feel exactly the same.

The Philips 34B2U6603CH fits that bill to a tee. It pairs a 34in 3,440 x 1,440 ultrawide panel with a huge amount of features, an adjustable stand, and the promise of factory-calibrated sRGB color accuracy. And whether you've got a whole fleet of port-starved laptops or just the one sitting on your desk at home, the single-cable USB-C simplicity is an easy sell.

Notably, Thunderbolt 4 makes an appearance along with daisy-chain support and up to 96W of power delivery, and you also get a USB 3.2 Gen 2 hub with a decent fistful of ports, a KVM switch, PIP/PBP functions, and presence and light sensors for ticking all the power saving boxes. Oh, and you also get a Windows Hello-compliant webcam. In other words, the only thing conspicuously missing here is the kitchen sink.

Philips 34B2U6603CH monitor: Design & Features

Sharing the same styling as its smaller 27in stablemate, the 27B2G5500, this is a smart-looking monitor. The same tool-free design means that the base screws easily to the stand with a captive thumbscrew, and the panel slots on with a reassuring clunk thanks to the quick release mechanism. If you prefer to use a desk or wall mount, then standard VESA 100x100 mounting holes are present, too.

The huge ultrawide panel means that there's no pivot mode, but that's to be expected. What you do get is 360 degrees of side-to-side swivel, a generous 180mm of height adjustment, and enough tilt to accommodate any normal desk arrangement. The leverage exerted by the wide panel means that it does wobble a little bit after each adjustment, but not worryingly so – the solid-feeling base stays planted on the desk even when you adjust the screen one-handed.

It's quite clear that the 34B26603CH is designed primarily for work. An adjustable, pop-out 5MP webcam peeps out over the top bezel and this is partnered with an integrated noise-cancelling mic and stereo speakers. The webcam is Windows Hello-compliant, and while the image quality isn't astonishing, it's fine. Colors are reasonably realistic, and while detail is smeared and indistinct, it's no worse than many laptop webcams. One bonus is that it provides a more flattering camera angle than a laptop, as it's positioned just above head height, and the auto framing works well, too.

Similarly, the integrated mic and speakers aren't the last word in clarity, but they work. The speakers are the worst of the two, however, and despite a claimed 5 watts of power per channel, the brittle, tinny sound quality robs both voices and music of any scale or depth.

This is probably the perfect time to mention that there is somewhere to hang your headset: just like the smaller 27B2G5500, there's a little fold-out arm that is hidden on the left-hand edge. This is located just above the easy-access USB ports and 3.5mm headset jack, which is convenient. If you are using a wired headset, though, then you'll need to be careful not to get all your audio and USB cables in a tangle.

It's also great to see the same power-saving features we encountered on the 27B2G5500. The PowerSensor feature dims the screen when it detects users have left their desks, and this has four sensitivity settings to account for how far the user is sat from the screen. This worked well during our time with the monitor, dropping the backlight right down to 1cd/m2 after a minute, and turning it off completely after two.

By contrast, the LightSensor feature is either on or off and this actively dims the screen's backlight to suit the ambient lighting conditions. The problem here is that the default settings are too bright. Even with the sensor covered completely, the panel's brightness never dipped below 200cd/m2, which is far too bright for even a normally lit office. To test the monitor's peak automatic brightness, we shone a torch into the sensor, which saw a peak reading of 315cd/m2.

Our advice here is to enable the monitor's SmartUniformity setting, as this lowers the overall brightness to create a more usable range from 144cd/m2 to 278cd/m2. It's a bit of a bodge – these automatic brightness modes need to be more customizable as standard in our opinion – but as the SmartUniformity setting also improves overall panel uniformity, as we'll discuss in more detail later, it's not a terrible compromise.

Connectivity goes above and beyond. There are two HDMI 2.0 ports and a single DisplayPort 1.4 input, and this is in addition to a Thunderbolt 4-compliant USB-C port which ferries data, video and up to 96W of power delivery alongside a second Thunderbolt 4 port for daisy-chain duties. The separate upstream USB-C port doesn't support video inputs but allows a second machine to utilise the USB hub's four USB-A ports, single USB-C port and 2.5G Ethernet connection.

Most of these ports are at the rear of the monitor, but you get a handful on the monitor's left-hand edge for easy access. There's a 3.5mm headset jack, one USB-A port with Battery Charging 1.2 support for fast-charging mobile devices, a standard USB-A data port, and a single USB-C port with a useful 45W of power delivery. All the USB ports support USB 3.2 Gen 2 10Gbps data rates.

Users hoping to take advantage of the single-cable Thunderbolt 4 connectivity will need to check their system specs, however. Older laptops and graphics cards may not support the maximum 120Hz refresh rates, and this is dependent on whether the hardware supports the latest Thunderbolt 4, DisplayPort 1.4 and HBR 3 standards. Even if your hardware is bang up to date, you'll need to make do with a 60Hz refresh rate if you want both the USB hub and Ethernet ports to run at their maximum speeds. Bump the refresh rate to 120Hz and you'll drop down to USB 3.2 Gen 1 data rates, and the Ethernet will fall back to gigabit speeds.

Our advice is simple: if you want maximum data speeds, then you can resort to using the dedicated DisplayPort or HDMI inputs alongside the USB-C or Thunderbolt 4 data connections. Two cables aren't necessarily better than one, but sometimes they're just much less hassle.

Philips has added both KVM switching and PIP/PBP functions (dubbed MultiView) to the feature list. Unlike Dell's similarly-equipped UltraSharp models, there's no dedicated desktop app for customizing the various features or creating specific keyboard shortcuts. For the KVM switch, you have two choices: you can either switch between devices by triple tapping the Ctrl button on any keyboard which is connected to the monitor's USB hub, or you can go via the monitor's on-screen display, which is less onerous than you might first assume. This is because the front panel's User button can be customized for quick access to either Volume, MultiView, Brightness, KVM, or PowerSensor settings. Set it to KVM, and you can swap between machines with two button presses.

One limitation is that only the active computer has access to the Ethernet connection. If you need the dormant machine to have internet access, then you'll need to make sure you have a Wi-Fi connection set up as a fallback.

Philips' MultiView PIP and PBP functions are pretty simple and straightforward to use, although they are limited to two sources at a time. In an ideal world, this is an area where we'd find it a little easier to manage the settings with a desktop app, as delving through the various settings in the on-screen display is fiddly. That said, if you tend to just choose your preferred settings and then enable or disable PIP or PBP when required, it's workable – it's just not particularly elegant.

Philips 34B2U6603CH monitor: Display quality

Philips has opted for an 8-bit, 3,440 x 1,440 VA panel with standard edge-lit backlighting. The specifications promise a peak brightness of 450cd/m2 in SDR mode and 550cd/m2 in HDR mode, and thanks to the use of a VA rather than an IPS panel, the claimed static contrast ratio is a creditable 4,000:1. There's no wide gamut support on offer, but Philips states that color accuracy in the sRGB color space is good enough to achieve a Delta E of less than 2 – you even get a factory calibration test sheet in the box. In layman's terms, that means that colors should look perfectly accurate to the naked eye.

The results in our testing were generally pretty close to Philips' claims – some better than claimed, some a little worse -- but the overall impression is of a monitor that provides good rather than great image quality.

Straight out of the box, the monitor's brightness is set at 40% which equates to a brightness of 165cd/m2, which is about right for brightly lit offices. Crank it up to 100%, and brightness peaks at 401cd/m2, a little lower than the claimed 450cd/m2. The measured contrast ratio is 3,664:1, which is only just a tad short of the claimed 4,000:1.

We recorded an sRGB coverage of 96% and an sRGB volume of 120%, the latter matching Philips's claims exactly. This proves that the monitor can reproduce some colors outside of the sRGB color space, but in our tests, it only managed to reproduce 83% of the DCI-P3 color space and 81% of Adobe RGB, which isn't enough for color-critical usage.

At default settings and tested against the sRGB color space, the panel's average Delta E was 2.5 and the maximum Delta E was 10.35. Tested against a Display P3 target, the results were very similar, with a lower Delta E of 2 and a maximum of 10. Looking at the results of both tests, the panel clearly struggles to reproduce the more saturated blue tones. What's more, we recorded a white point of 6,294k, which falls slightly short of the ideal 6,500k, and means that whites also look just a tad cold and bluish.

Activating the monitor's preset sRGB mode improves matters a lot, thankfully. The maximum Delta E drops down to 7.5, which is still a bit high – it indicates that the panel simply can't reproduce those shades of blue – but the average drops down to 1.38, with both greyscales and most of the tested colors looking to stay well under a Delta E of 2, which both matches Philips' claims and means they look accurate to the eye.

The Philips's HDR performance won't have much impact for office use, and it's not particularly exciting. We couldn't get anywhere near the claimed 550cd/m2 peak brightness, and we found that the brightest preset, HDR Premium, topped out at 459cd/m2 in static tests. We managed to squeeze 480cd/m2 out of it in HDR test videos, however. There's no local dimming on offer here, so it's thanks to the VA panel's relatively high contrast ratio that HDR content looks reasonably punchy. Dim the lights a little, and the modest peak brightness levels and strong contrast combine to make HDR images look surprisingly good.

The curved screen means that viewing angles are somewhat less of an issue than flat screen monitors. At least, that is, if you don't move your head too far from the center of the screen. VA panels exhibit something known as gamma shift, and this means that the darker areas of the screen look progressively brighter and more washed out as you move further away from head-on, particularly vertically. The curve of the monitor means that both this and color wash-out can be even more noticeable on the odd occasion you roll your chair away from a perfect head-on position.

Motion performance is actually rather good – and especially so at the panel's maximum 120Hz refresh rate. Basic AMD Freesync support is on the billing, and while the claimed 4ms GTG response time isn't going to keep any gaming monitors up at night, the panel puts in a decent overall performance. The Philips' overdrive feature, dubbed SmartResponse, is disabled by default, but there are four settings to choose from: Disabled, Fast, Faster and Fastest. I'd recommend upping that to the middle Faster setting if you want to reduce motion blur, whether that be for games or movies. The slower Fast setting doesn't have a huge impact, and the highest Fastest setting introduces too much inverse ghosting due to overshoot.

Panel uniformity isn't great at default settings – brightness dips by as much as 20% around the left and right corners of the panel – but activating the SmartUniformity setting works wonders. Peak brightness drops down significantly to 278cd/m2, and the brightness fluctuations drop from double figures down to a maximum of 7%. The only two areas of concern that remain are near the top edge of the monitor and we suspect this is where the backlight LEDs are positioned -- it's here that contrast varies by just a whisker more than the surrounding areas. These discrepancies aren't intrusive in daily usage, however.

It's worth noting that activating HDR disables the SmartUniformity feature as the panel needs all the brightness it can muster for high dynamic range content. For day-to-day use, however, we'd leave SmartUniformity enabled – especially if you're using the LightSensor feature, for the reasons discussed earlier.

Philips 34B2U6603CH monitor: Is it worth it?

Let us cut to the chase: If you prize image quality above all else, then this is not the monitor for you. The simple fact is that you can buy brighter, more colorful ultrawide QD-OLED or wide gamut IPS monitors for a broadly similar sum these days, and the Philips's image quality and limited color gamut are by far its least enticing qualities. It's more than good enough for everyday work and business duties, but we'd hesitate to recommend it for any roles that encompass creative work, and especially any of a color-critical nature. And if movies and games are a big part of your daily diet, whether that be for work or leisure purposes, you can get far more bang for your buck elsewhere.

If your needs are more productivity-focused, however, then the Philips' sheer breadth of talents is its strongest suit – it packs in a huge amount for the money. The feature list is ideal for the hot desking culture and home offices alike, and the styling, build quality, and general day-to-day experience of using the monitor all get a passing grade, too. It's not luxuriously fancy in any respect, but the Philips 34B2U6603CH allies ultrawide convenience with a resolutely useful feature list for sensible money. If that's the role you're hiring for, then it's fair to say that Philips has put together a very convincing CV.

Philips 34B2U6603CH specifications