Straight from the box the image from the BDM4037UW was bright and fairly vibrant. There was a lack of depth in places, due to inappropriate gamma handling. Fortunately, Philips provide a range of gamma modes, to alleviate this issue quite easily. The white point was close to the desirable ‘6500K’, but the monitor did have some grey neutrality issues. With some careful tweaking, as explored in our ‘Test Settings’ below, it was possible to neutralise both issues whilst maintaining excellent gamma tracking – purely using adjustments in the OSD. The image below shows the gamma tracking under our ‘Test Settings’.







Gamma 'Test Settings'

There was also a useful ‘5000K’ colour temperature mode, acting as a ‘Low Blue Light’ (LBL) setting even if not by name. Although we didn’t use this in our testing, we did use it for our own viewing comfort later on in the evening. We will end this section with some words of caution., particularly relevant if you like tweaking OSD settings or perhaps using different settings for day vs. night. You have to be very careful about the order you do things in. If you are configuring ‘Color’, for example, the brightness level will reset to ‘100’ if you select ‘sRGB’ (and you only need to ‘hover over’ the setting to select it). So you lose any custom brightness setting you may have set. The ‘Gamma’ setting is also overridden if you cycle to and select ‘User Define’ in the ‘Color’ menu. In order to switch from the ‘User Define’ default gamma tracking to one of the ‘Gamma’ settings, you need to select your required ‘Gamma’ setting after configuring the colour channels rather than before. And also re-select the gamma setting if you switch the monitor off then on again. There were similar quirks with the BDM4350UC, so whilst only a minor niggle it would have been nice to have seen these sorted out by now.





For our ‘Test Settings’ we made various changes to colour channels, altered gamma mode and reduced brightness. Rather counter-intuitively reducing the red channel from ‘100’ to ‘99’ was a necessary part of the process of removing an unwanted cool tint to certain grey shades. Be aware that individual units vary, so these settings are only to be used as a suggestion. Also be aware that you need to re-select ‘2.4’ gamma (or whichever setting you might prefer) if you turn the monitor off then on again, as noted previously. Any setting not mentioned here was left at default.





Brightness= 66 (according to preferences and lighting) Brightness= 66 (according to preferences and lighting) SmartResponse= Standard Gamma= 2.4 Color= User Define R= 99 G= 85 B= 83



We used a BasICColor SQUID 3 (X-Rite i1Display Pro) to measure the luminance of white and black using a range of settings. From these values, static contrast ratios were calculated. This data is shown in the table below, with blue highlights indicating the results under our ‘Test Settings’ and black highlights indicating the highest white luminance, lowest black luminance and peak contrast ratio recorded. Assume any settings not mentioned in the table were left at default, with the exceptions noted in the calibration section.

With only brightness adjusted the average static contrast was 3635:1 (excluding at ‘0% brightness’ where rounding for the black luminance affects the calculated value too significantly). This is strong and fairly close to the 4000:1 specified. Following the significant colour channel adjustments made under our ‘Test Settings’, this fell slightly to a still respectable 3380:1. This is firmly ‘VA only’ territory as far as LCDs go and it gives a nice depth and ‘inkiness’ to blacks and other light colours, particularly in high-contrast situations such as black text on a white background. The peak contrast recorded was 4457:1 with ‘Color = User Define’ and all colour channels in their neutral positon of ‘100’. The lowest contrast ratio recorded was 2671:1 with the ‘SmartUniformity’ Uniformity Compensation (UC) setting enabled. The highest white luminance recorded in this table was 312 cd/m² and the lowest white luminance 63 cd/m², providing a luminance adjustment range of 249 cd/m².

A Dynamic Contrast mode called ‘SmartContrast’ features, which can be activated with changes made to other settings. The exception to this is brightness, which is not greyed out but will be ignored once ‘SmartContrast’ starts doing its thing. And it’s thing is to dynamically alter the backlight brightness according to the overall level of ‘light’ or ‘dark’ on the screen. This did work to dim the screen effectively for predominantly darker content and brighten it effectively for brighter content, but is as usual limited in effectiveness by the fact the backlight acts as one unit (BLU – Backlight Unit).





PWM (Pulse Width Modulation)

The monitor does not use PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) at any brightness level and instead uses DC (Direct Current) to regulate brightness. The backlight is therefore considered flicker-free, which will come as welcome news to those sensitive to the side-effects of PWM usage (or simply prefer to know that the backlight is ‘flicker free’).





Luminance uniformity

Whilst observing a black screen in a dark room, using our test settings, we could see some backlight bleed towards the bottom left. There was also some clouding here and there, but nothing noticeable during normal use. The image below shows this, with the photo taken a sufficient distance back from the monitor to eliminate so-called ‘VA glow’. This is a slightly purple glow emanating primarily from the bottom corners of the screen, as viewed from a normal viewing position. It becomes more pronounced if you view the monitor off-angle as demonstrated in a video later on. This is very subtle and not at all comparable to ‘IPS glow’ – it does not have the same significant impact on dark content.





