Recently, Samsung 17-inch monitors have been in the news for the wrong reasons. For acute shortage of stocks, to be precise. Your loss is often your competitor's gain. That saying holds true in this case too. Philips is one that believes in making hay while the sun shines. And while the Samsung stocks hid behind the clouds, the sun did shine bright on Philips thanks to every other vendor in the local market trying to push their 17" models to keep the show running. Today, let's find out how good the basic 17" model from Philips actually is.

Having said what I just did, I certainly did not mean that Philips monitors were just a filler material in the absence of Samsung. As we all know, Philips is a global electronics giant and their monitors have been pretty popular in this part of the world too, for a number of years now.

The Philips 107-E51 is a neat-looking conventional flat screen monitor (not the true flat type) with a 16" viewable screen area. All the functions supported by the monitor are accessible using the three buttons located at the front of the monitor. It supports a horizontal dot pitch of 0.23 mm and a diagonal dot pitch of 0.27 mm. The frequency range supported by this model is 30 KHz to 70 KHz (horizontal) and 50 Hz to 160 Hz (vertical). The maximum resolution supported is 1280 x 1024 pixels at 60 Hz refresh rate, while the recommended resolution stands at 1024 x 768 pixels at 85 Hz. However, the maximum usable resolution is 1152 x 864 pixels at 75 Hz. Maximum usable resolution signifies the maximum resolution supported by a monitor at a refresh rate of 75 Hz or better. Though 85 Hz is an ideal refresh rate, 75 Hz is the lower limit. Any refresh rate below 75 Hz will give a flickered output and can cause some serious eye damage after prolonged usage. The above specifications are on par with most of the standard 17" monitors available here.

We tested this monitor using DisplayMate to get a bearing on how well the monitor performs when put through various test patterns. DisplayMate first lets you tune a monitor to get the best possible display settings and then runs it through a series of test patterns to test everything from color/brightness to screen geometry to moiré and regulation.

The screen geometry was perfect and so was the screen brightness. The color reproduction was up to the mark and the monitor gave a rich and vibrant output. The contrast, though not bad, has some margin for improvement. There was a bit of moiré visible, but we were easily able to eliminate it using the controls provided. In the regulation tests though, there was some expansion and contraction of the screen. It was noticeable, but certainly did not assume alarming proportions. Also, in the horizontal color registration test, there was a slight mismatch of color near the left edge of the screen.

The Philips 107-E51 is good monitor overall, with a few minor shortcomings, which if ironed out, has the potential to be one of the best 17" monitors around. It is currently available for a street price of Rs. 5,450 with a three-year warranty, which makes it Rs. 350 cheaper than its Samsung counterpart. We would still recommend the Samsung 793S, which is a better monitor though not drastically. However, in this Philips monitor, you have a good alternative.