Philips Evnia 8000 34″ Curved QD OLED Gaming Monitor Review

Performance

An HDR OLED panel, an SDR Jpeg on a website on whatever screen you’re looking at does not and will not do this justice. Plus, the gloss on the screen and the fact these photos are taken in the brighter office doesn’t help. It looks astounding in person, I promise you that. Peak brightness and colour make any movie look amazing. The black levels are what you expect from OLED, but the colour detail is top-tier stuff here, both in sRGB modes for SDR content and HDR content with very high coverage of DCI-P3 colour.

Interestingly, 16:9 content on a 21:9 does result in black bars, which I don’t mind having used 21:9 myself for some time now. However, on my LED panel, you do get some glow and torching in the black bars. On OLED it is totally black, and frames the picture so much better.

At 175hz, this monitor is plenty fast. However, I game at this refresh rate all the time, so I’m used to it. However, this monitor feels significantly faster and smoother than what I’m used to. OLED just slaps when it comes to fast refresh rates. There’s no blur, no image ghosting at all here, and the drop to a staggering 0.1-millisecond refresh rate from the 1ms-ish I’m used to, is actually noticeable, it feels so snappy and tight while gaming.

Side note, the RTX 4090 does not have to work had to max out this monitor, which is nice.

Barely breaking a sweat and the render latency and fast monitor latency make for a great experience with competitive gaming.

The colours, the contrast, and the brightness, all combine with the fast refresh rate and latency to make for a truly class-leading gaming experience. We already knew OLED was good for gaming, but add the ultrawide aspect ratio and this is, by far, the best gaming monitor experience I’ve had in years, and let’s just agree I get to play on a LOT of astonishing monitors, so that’s saying something.

The screenspace is great for work too, this may be a gaming-focused panel, but I’ll be damned if I can’t make use of an ultrawide colour-accurate OLED panel for work!

3440 x 1440 is fast becoming a popular resolution, and the amount of applications and games that can take advantage of the increased real estate is simply huge now. Plus, it’s actually not as demanding as 4K, so most GPUs can high great refresh rates at this resolution, and it negates the need for a twin-monitor setup and the bezel gap that comes with it.

you can more than comfortably put two windows side by side, but honestly, that’s possible on 16:9 too.

Even with three windows, things are still very easy to read without mucking about with the zoom levels, and it also puts the main window right in front of you too, which is much better.

I do watch a lot of movies at my desk, like… A LOT, but more on that in a coming feature, and honestly, this monitor is truly in a league of one as far as I’m concerned. The HDR performance is godly, no matter what you throw at it. Plus, the panel dims itself a lot in most profiles (HDR mode), but in True Black 400, it’s extremely rare and minimised a lot compared to the aggressive dimming seen on some of the older OLED monitors out there.

Plus, the number of movies that are shot in wide formats is huge, and it’s so immersive watching them on this panel… bonus points if you can name the movie below.

And no, while I’m extremely happy with the picture quality on this panel, let’s use some science to see just how accurate it really is.