The story of Mini LED gaming monitors like this Philips Evnia 32M2N6800 with Full Area Local Dimming (FALD) is a curious one. Five years ago, we reviewed one of the first: the Asus PG27UQ monitor, which came with 384 dimming zones and cost a whopping £2,400. A year later we tested the Acer Predator X32FP, which offered 576 dimming zones and came with an asking price of £1,400.
Nowadays, the high-end is dominated by a new generation of OLED monitors, but Mini LED gaming monitors are not going to cede the high-end without a fight if the Philips Evnia 32M2N6800 has anything to say about it.
For the same price as a decent 27in OLED gaming screen like the Agon Pro AG276QZD this Philips delivers a higher-resolution, and larger 32in monitor that can deliver levels of brightness that OLED panels can only dream about, while at the same time serving up HDR quality and motion fidelity that, if not quite at OLED levels, is pretty darned close.
Philips Evnia 32M2N6800 review: What do you get for your money?
The meat and potatoes of the Phlips Evnia 32M2N6800 is a 31.5in 3,840 x 2,160 IPS panel with 1,152 local dimming zones. It’s a very sharp panel and if you can detect any pixel structure even when right up close to the screen you have much better eyesight than I. The panel itself has a matte finish, which does sterling work keeping reflections at bay.
The dark grey plastic cabinet isn’t as nice to look at or touch as the smooth, light grey equivalents you’ll find on higher-end Evnia monitors like the 49M2C8900 or 34M2C8600 but it still feels solid and well bolted together. The top and side bezels are barely 5mm thick, while the chin at the bottom only measures 25mm, making the 32M2N6800 about as “edgeless” as it’s possible to be.
The stand is a familiar splay-footed Evnia affair that is admirably stable. It allows for the expected level of tilt and pivot adjustment but lacks anything in the way of a rotation, so if you want a monitor you can use in portrait orientation you either need to look elsewhere or make use of the 100 x 100mm VESA mount that hides beneath the stand bracket.
There’s nothing untoward about the size or weight of the 32M2N6800, either. Its 9.3kg with the stand (7.4kg without) and 715 x 612 x 311mm at maximum height are par for the 32in monitor course.
Take a shufti around the back of the 32M2N6800 and you’ll find a brace of HDMI 2.1 video inputs, a single DisplayPort 1.4 input, three USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 downstream data ports, a single USB-B upstream port, and a 3.5mm audio jack.
The absence of the USB-C input means the 32M2N6800 lacks KVM capacity, so you can’t switch between video inputs and use the same keyboard and mouse. There is basic support for Picture-by-Picture and Picture-in-Picture dual feeds but, given the price, I think Philips has been rather parsimonious in not supplying a USB-C port. Another feature I would like to have seen, given the 32M2N6800 lacks anything in the way of a speaker system, is a digital audio output.
I do, however, like the controls Philips has used here: rather than a row of buttons to manage settings, the new Evnia has a single small, clickable joystick that sits in the lower right rear corner of the cabinet. It’s a great piece of design, and makes navigating the onscreen display menus easy and intuitive, which is not something you can say of most monitors.
Philips Evnia 32M2N6800 review: How good is the image quality?
The Evnia 32M2N6800 has one of the best IPS panels on the market and it can reproduce 177% of sRGB, 125% of DCI-P3 and 122% of AdobeRGB. Colour is presented with a high degree of accuracy, too.
Compared with the ideal profile, the sRGB, DCI-P3 and AdobeRGB presets in the Native picture mode returned Delta E variances of 1.03, 1.09 and 1.17 respectively. As a rule of thumb, variances of 1 or less are going to be indistinguishable to even the most skilled of colourists. For what is first and foremost a gaming monitor the new Evnia is bang on the money.
Thanks to the Mini LED backlight, brightness reaches levels beyond the most fevered imaginings of any OLED display, with peak full-screen brightness of 884cd/m² in SDR mode and 1,443cd/m² in HDR mode, the latter more than sufficient to earn the screen its DisplayHDR 1000 certification.
A case could easily be made for the Evnia’s screen being too bright. Flicking the display to a full-screen white image at maximum brightness in HDR mode was an almost painful experience that caused me to look quickly away and even with the brightness turned down as low as it would go, my colorimeter still read 110cd/m².
In SDR mode, with the local dimming turned off, the contrast ratio came in at 1,080:1 which is the middle of the road for an IPS panel and far less than you would get from a VA let alone an OLED screen. However, in HDR mode or SDR mode with local dimming set to Strong, the contrast ratio increased to an OLED-matching inifinity:1 thanks to a perfect absence of backlight show-through in black areas.
With 1,152 lighting zones, I expected to see some halo effect when the panel was showing bright artefacts moving against a black background, but it was not as obvious as I had expected. Running a test clip showing a field of white stars against a black background while turning the local dimming system on and off demonstrated just how effective the Evnia’s backlight is, with only a tiny bit of glow evident around each of the stars.
The Evnia has four HDR modes: Vivid, Movie, DisplayHDR 1000 and Personal, which you can tune to your liking. DisplayHDR 1000 returns the highest level of brightness but makes the Windows desktop look washed out. Switching to Vivid or Movie knocks around 200cd/m² off the peak brightness, but the colour balance and saturation are better, meaning you can leave your Windows PC in HDR mode permanently should you wish to. HDR content looks superb on Evnia 32M2N6800.
And despite what looks like, on paper, to be a sub-par 144Hz refresh rate, motion fidelity is actually pretty good.
The Blur Buster’s UFO test didn’t return the sort of wholly blur-free motion you get from a fast OLED display, but there’s little in the way of blurring or ghosting and with the screen’s SmartResponse setting in the Fastest mode this disappeared. There is some inverse ghosting in the form of a tail of bright artefacts behind moving images but if you drop to Fast or Faster settings these go away, too.
Also worth pointing out here is that you can fix the refresh rate to 120Hz in the OSD, which is a feature console users will appreciate.
Panel uniformity was good in all the basic picture modes but slightly better in the dedicated SmartUniformity setting. In Standard mode, all 25 areas of the screen fell inside the “Recommended” or “Nominal” range for both accuracy and brightness, but in the SmartUniformity mode, two zones moved into the Recommended category leaving only four in Nominal. You’ll need a colorimeter to detect these marginal differences making this a good performance by any standard.
Philips Evnia 32M2N6800 review: Are there any other features I should know about?
This being an Evnia display you get Philips’ Ambiglow LED lighting system which uses 16 bright LED lights and one central LED strip set into the rear of the cabinet to cast a light show onto the wall behind it. I’ve always been a fan of Ambiglow, even if the results from Philip’s PC monitors are not as impressive as they are from its Ambilight TVs like the excellent Philips OLED807.
The effectiveness of the Ambiglow Follow Video feature is somewhat lessened on the 32M2N6800 by the fact that it doesn’t work in conjunction with local area dimming in either SDR or HDR modes, but you are still left with a host of colour and pattern options.
This being first and foremost a gaming monitor, Philips has loaded it with most of the features you’d expect, such as crosshair, sniper zoom and four-level shadow boost to help you see opponents lurking in the shadows. The only thing missing is a frame counter. Naturally, there is also support for Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD FreeSync adaptive sync technology.
Philips makes a special mention of the low input lag of the 32M2N6800 and rightly so. Playing Counter-Strike 2 with the Low Input Lag setting turned on, the system reaction time felt subjectively very fast indeed.
Philips Evnia 32M2N6800 review: Should I buy it?
Dedicated eSport players will probably turn their noses up at any gaming monitor with a refresh rate below 240Hz, but for the rest of us, the new Evnia 32M2N6800 is well worthy of consideration, especially if you want a monitor for other serious uses like pro-level creative work or intense productivity.
The core gaming audience, meanwhile, will be drawn by the solid motion fidelity, impressive HDR performance and by the 1,152-zone FALD array that can be used in SDR mode to boost contrast levels. Combine all that quality with a reasonable price and we have not only a winner of a gaming monitor but an overdue flag-bearer for Mini LED technology.
