Laptops may account for the bulk of computer sales, but it’s hard to argue against the advantages of a big screen, especially when you have to juggle multiple apps at the same time. A big, high-resolution display opens up possibilities that even the biggest laptops cannot aim to match.
And they don’t come much bigger than the monitor we’ll be reviewing today. We’ve had the chance to spend a few weeks using the Philips BDM4350UC, a 43-inch 4K LCD monitor, to see whether a really big screen can turbocharge your productivity. Could this be the monitor of your dreams? It’s time to find out.
Philips BDM4350UC design and specifications
Given its size, it’s no surprise that the Philips BDM4350UC resembles a television more than a traditional monitor. In most cases, monitors — except ones with atypical aspect ratios — look like smaller televisions, save for the fact that most of them have stands that let you adjust their position in ways that televisions aren’t designed for.
But the Philips BDM4350UC looks just like any television of its size. In fact, installing this monitor involves fixing two legs stick out quite a bit on either side of the monitor, just like we’ve seen with large-screen televisions by the likes of Xiaomi and others. We didn’t have a table large enough to accommodate this monitor fixed to its legs, so we decided to leave them in the box.
Thankfully, the monitor is still stable enough to stand on its own without any problems, and that’s how we used it for the entire duration of our test period. Though there’s a slight tilt to the back when it’s in this position, it’s definitely not as stable as it would be with the legs, and we don’t advise using it like this out in the real world. With or without the legs, there’s no way to adjust the height of the monitor, nor do you have the option to tilt or swivel the display in any way, which is a bit of a change from many popular standard-sized monitors.
The sheer size of this monitor is something you’ll need to keep in mind before purchasing it, as physically, it may not just be a plug-and-play replacement for, say, the 24-inch monitor you’re currently using. It does have a standard 200x200mm VESA mount for wall-mounting, or for a third-party VESA stand that could enable tilt and swivel adjustment that the monitor lacks by itself.
The bezels aren’t particularly large, but this is no edge-to-edge monitor, and one could argue that it doesn’t need to be because of its sheer size. We never really noticed the bezels, probably because there was so much screen real estate occupying our field of view. The overall design looks and feels premium, and this monitor is nothing like most of the budget televisions that we’ve seen recently.
A small plasticky piece jets out from the centre at the bottom. This piece features a Philips logo and a small LED that stays on without attracting any attention when the device is powered on, and strobes gently when it is in standby mode.
All the ports are at the back, on the left-hand side (as you reach backwards from the front) near the bottom, except for the power inlet which is on the right. You get two HDMI 2.0 ports (with MHL), two DisplayPort 1.2 ports, and a VGA port for input. Additionally, you get four USB 3.0 ports, one of which is listed to support “fast charging”, and a USB-in port to connect the monitor’s USB ports to your computer. Audio-in and audio-out (3.5mm) ports are also thrown in for good measure. As we noted, all these ports face outwards, which did not prove to be a problem for us, but it might be a concern if you wish to wall mount this monitor.
The Philips BDM4350UC offers plenty of ports
The panel measures 42.51 inches (108cm) diagonally, which allows Philips to market this as a 43-inch monitor. The native resolution of 3840×2160 pixels is supported at up to 60Hz, with a claimed typical response time of 5ms. The peak brightness is said to be 300 nits, with a typical contrast ratio of 1200:1. The panel does not support HDR. There are two built-in speakers of 7W each, which sounds like a good idea in theory, and we’ll soon find out how they perform in the real world.
The monitor also supports picture-in-picture (PIP) and picture-by-picture (PBP) modes that let it display input from more than one device at the same time. There are no buttons at the front — there’s only one joystick-style button at the back near the bottom right that’s used to control all settings. It takes some getting used to the positioning and functioning of this button, but after a couple of days with the monitor we were reaching out for it and adjusting settings blind without any problems. A power button that can be flicked to turn the monitor on or off is also located at the back, though it’s not as easy to reach.
Philips BDM4350UC performance
In this section, we’ll focus on two main areas — the first, how it is to use a monitor of this size on a day-to-day basis, and the impact it can have on your productivity. The second is the performance of this panel itself, in which we will look at some benchmarks and other formal tests.
We connected the monitor to a Mac mini, and macOS defaulted to the native 4K resolution. We had no problems reading text and most other on-screen elements, so we didn’t bother scaling down to a lower resolution, though your mileage may vary. The only UI elements that seemed a bit too tiny for our comfort were the menu bar near the top right corner of the screen. Switching to 3200×1800 resolution resulted in a better experience.
With that said, we loved the extra pixels that the native resolution offers and switched back to it in no time, deciding to live with the slight discomfort of smaller menu bar icons. As you would expect, the 4K panel at its native resolution gives you an enormous amount of real estate, and as someone who’s constantly juggling multiple windows, we decided to make the most of it.
We dedicated one part of the screen to our email client, another to the browser, one to Slack (our chat application), and another to Google Analytics, which we love keeping an eye on in real time. We still had plenty of real estate leftover for other windows. While it was great being able to keep tabs on so many applications at the same time, we did notice some patterns in our usage.
Despite having all the additional pixels, we tended to position the “main application” — i.e. whatever we were focussing on at the time — near the bottom-left of the screen. So, while the mail client’s message list window stayed on the top-left of the screen, we composed emails near the bottom-left (thankfully the macOS Mail app remembers the winndow’s position after you’ve dragged it once). We found that the top half of the display was largely useless for anything other than monitoring apps that require an occasional glance.
While the ability to have large documents display on the screen in a tall window sounds good in theory, we found that looking at the top one-third (at least, if not the top half) of the screen for long requires too much effort, and it almost feels like watching a movie from the front row. We think that everyone will end up having “sweet spots” where most of the action takes place, with everything else in the periphery.
There are some other problems that arose due to the quirks of macOS combined with our usage habits. Notifications from Mac apps show up in the upper-right corner of the screen, and this is a behaviour that cannot be changed (other than disabling notifications altogether, of course). This means that if you’re focused on the bottom-left of the screen like us, it is all too easy to miss notifications due to the sheer size of this display. Even when we did manage to catch them, at times it seemed like too much effort to shift our attention to the top right corner and then back again to what we were working on.
We also booted into Windows on our Mac mini to see what the experience was like. By default, Windows resorted to 300 percent scaling, but we switched to 100 percent, and the experience was pretty similar to what we noted with macOS above. Text was sharp — even at 8-point size — and the overall experience was nothing like what you’d remember from hooking up your old, large-screen, non-4K TV to your computer a few years ago.
Of course to make the most of such a monitor, some people might need to change some habits. Many users who grew up using Windows are used to maximising their current window and using Alt-Tab to switch between apps. If you are someone who’s married to that working style, unless you are using apps like Photoshop or other pro-grade apps, you are unlikely to get much benefit out of a monitor of this size, and will likely see huge white (or black) bands on either side of your content.
Some of you might be worried about eye strain associated with using such a large display at relatively short distances. We didn’t experience any physical discomfort while using this monitor, but we’ve spent nearly every waking moment for the best part of the last 30 years in front of one screen or another, so we are probably not best suited to comment on the subject of eye strain and we recommend getting an opinion from a licensed medical professional instead.
As we mentioned earlier, diving into the monitor’s settings requires you to reach around for the joystick-style button, but we got used to it and the menu layout pretty quickly. The settings let you control basic stuff like the current input source, the picture format (widescreen, 4:3, or 1:1, though the latter seemed to have no effect and mimicked widescreen), colour temperature, gamma correction, brightness, contrast, and pretty much everything else you might expect (see images below).
Philips BDM4350UC OSD settings
There are a bunch of standard features under Philips’ marketing names, such as SmartImage presets that are supposedly optimised for Movie, Game, and Office scenarios, and SmartResponse which is designed to optimise response time and reduce lag while gaming. We were fairly happy with the settings out of the box, but it’s good to know that the options exist for those who want a bit more control.
Our favourite part of the settings panel was the one related to PIP and PBP. The former gives you an inset that takes over a part of the screen. You can select which source gets to be the main input, and which gets to be the inset. You can customise its position(top-left, bottom-left, bottom-right, top-right) as well as size (small, medium, large), with the inset taking over a little less than a quarter of the screen at its largest size.
PIP on the Philips BDM4350UC with an Apple TV in the inset
We found this to be useful while, say, working on the main screen while having an Apple TV connected so we could follow a cricket match while continuing to work. Yes, you can easily do this by having Hotstar open in a browser window on your machine, and both ways have their advantages and disadvantages.
We appreciated the ability to use the Apple TV remote to control the video we were watching without interrupting what we were working on, though the disadvantage is that we couldn’t control the exact positioning of the inset, the way you would a window on your computer. which means it can end up covering important on-screen elements. We wish there was a way to use the joystick to position the inset exactly where one wants.
PBP lets you position two, three, or four sources side by side, without any overlap. This didn’t appeal to us a lot, but your mileage may vary. It’s a nice way to have, say, the same computer and Apple TV running side by side so one doesn’t get in the way of the other. To get the most out of this mode, it’s best to have the resolution of your computer set to 1080p, as each input in PBP mode is being rendered in full-HD resolution.
PBP with two, three, and four sources. We had only two devices connected, hence the repition.
In the PassMark MonitorTest Master Screen, running at native 4K resolution in the 16:9 ratio, the top left grille with a pixel spacing of one pixel appeared as a uniform grey colour instead of individual black pixel lines. We switched to 4:3 and could then see the individual lines. However, the centre circle which is expected to be a circle at 4:3 was more of an oval, while it appeared to be a perfect circle at 16:9. The opposite happened with the four smaller circles in the corners. We didn’t notice any blurring or smearing in the six coloured squares near the…
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