Philips Evnia 49M2C8900

One panel, 5120 by 1440, 240 Hz, QD-OLED. It replaced a two-monitor setup and I have not wanted the second one back.

Why I like it

The width is the feature. Two full-size editor panes and a terminal sit side by side with no bezel running through the middle of your attention, and a browser can live in the third of the screen you are not coding in. Everything I used a window manager for, I now do by dragging.

QD-OLED black is the other half. On an ultrawide, an LCD's backlight bleed is spread across half a metre of panel and you stop seeing it as a flaw and start seeing it as the colour of black. Once you have had per-pixel black at this width, going back is difficult.

240 Hz on a screen this wide is more useful for dragging windows and reading fast-scrolling logs than for anything else I do. I would not pay for it alone, and I would not give it up.

The fault, described properly

The built-in speakers over DisplayPort develop a crackle and a continuous white noise after roughly two hours of uptime. I chased this for weeks. A full PC reboot cured it, until it stopped curing it. The decisive test was pulling the monitor's mains lead for thirty seconds: the audio came back completely clean, which a PC reboot could not do. The corrupted state lives in the panel's own DisplayPort audio receiver, not on the machine.

So: if you buy this monitor, use a headset or separate speakers, and if you do use the built-in ones, know that the cure is to power-cycle the monitor at the wall rather than to reinstall your audio driver. I would still buy it. I would rather have one clearly located firmware fault I can work around than a vague one I cannot.

The panel also asks to run a pixel refresh cycle at intervals, which is normal OLED maintenance and not a defect, though it will interrupt you at least once.

Who it's for

• Anyone who runs two monitors and resents the bezel between them.
• People who work in dark rooms and care about black level more than peak brightness.
• Not for you if you need the built-in speakers as your only audio, if your desk is under 1.2 m wide, or if your work is mostly static high-contrast interfaces left on screen for hours. OLED wants movement.