At Digital Foundry HQ, OLED monitors are like buses – you don’t see any for ages and then three come at once. Today we’re taking a look at one 34-inch QD-OLED, the £1149 Philips Evnia 34M2C8600, and two 27-inch W-OLEDs, the £965 LG 27GR95QE and £920 Corsair Xeneon 27QHD240. Can any of them compare to the £1600 45-inch Corsair Xeneon Flex, and which is the best option for immersive or competitive gaming in the ultra-premium monitor space? All three have their features and flaws, but at the end of the day I have a clear preference…
Let’s start with the Philips model. Part of their Evnia brand announced last year, the 34M2C8600 is a 34-inch ultrawide model with a familiar 3440×1440 QD-OLED display and 175Hz refresh rate that mirrors the Alienware AW3423DWF we currently recommend as the best ultrawide gaming monitor.
As it’s based around the same Samsung QD-OLED panel, we’d expect similar performance – but the design is surprisingly different here, with a silver colour scheme, the use of recycled materials and a curved back panel constructed from a series of regular squares. The ambient lighting here is the biggest functional addition, something that Philips is known for on their TVs, and it works marvellously here too, with options for mirroring the contents of the screen, producing a rainbow effect and so on. The design is therefore still quite gamer-y, but in perhaps a more subtle way than the Apple-made-a-spaceship effect of the Alienware design.
While I dig the look of the Philips monitor though, its actual functionality fall behind its competitors – chiefly due to a pixel refresh warning that pops up in the centre of the screen every two hours, then disappears in a matter of seconds – well before I had the wherewithal to stop gaming and either accept or dismiss it. This refresh doesn’t occur automatically while the monitor is idle or sleeping, so unless you manually run it yourself you’ll find that the monitor just turns itself off after 12 hours – which, as I start working around 8 o’clock, falls right in my peak gaming time in the evening. I at least have the luxury of a second monitor that I can switch to in the meantime, but if this was your only monitor this would get old really fast. Thankfully, you can at least disable this message using the OSD (setup -> OLED panel care -> auto warning -> off).
Other annoyances include the joystick, which turns the monitor off if pressed in – you need to press to the right to enter the menu or confirm – and the rather prominent Evnia and Philips branding on the thick bottom bezel, which as it’s silver is a bit immersion-breaking. There’s also a bright LED here by default while the monitor is on, although this can be dimmed or disabled in the OSD.
Despite this though, there are some good touches too – including up to 90W of USB-C charging, allowing a MacBook (or similar) to be plugged in for video, peripherals and charging with a single cable; a capable stand with a good degree of height adjustment; easy VESA mounting alongside a moderate weight, allowing use of cheap-ish monitor arms; and a relatively subtle 1800R curvature that doesn’t break your head if you then look at a flat monitor.