While most monitors can viewed as much of a muchness in terms of features, with the Brilliance 225B Philips cannot be accused of not trying something different.

Taking it out of the box, the 225B admittedly does look much like your average 22in, 1,680 x ,1050 resolution display - silver bezel, buttons at the bottom right, name at the top left.

What’s different here is not the slightly tacky blue light underneath the Philips logo but the two black squares placed on the speaker bar at the bottom.

These infra-red sensors are evidence of a feature dubbed by Philips as ‘PowerSensor’. The idea is that the monitor can detect when you’re not actually sitting in front of your machine and dim the screen automatically, dropping the power consumption from the default of 40 watts, to 20 watts, in order to save on those energy bills - something no company is going to argue about in the current climate or any other.

This is all fine and dandy as an idea but in practice it is a little tricky to set up. The sensor has five settings – Off, 1, 2, 3, and 4, with four being the most powerful, and the range is given as 30cm – 120cm. This means that when you’re sitting very, very, close to the screen, you’ll use setting one, but if further away you’ll need use a higher setting.

The default is set to 3, but we found that sitting a perfectly normal distance from the display at our desk, unless we used setting 4, the monitor couldn’t detect our presence, and dropped into powersaving mode, with a rather irritating 'PowerSensor – Saving Mode ON’ message appearing bang in the middle of the screen. This disappears as soon as you move back in front of the screen however.



The Sensor setting can be easily adjusted from one of the buttons on the bottom right, but we imagine that setting 1 would only be useful if you were virtually glued to the screen.

One has to wonder if the feature isn’t a little on the gimmicky side, as the alternative that most monitors use is just to power down the display after a period of inactivity and turn off the whole display, which would save even more energy.

Aside from this feature, the Philips 225B has a few other bells and whistles. Another button on the right gives you SmartImage presets, which adjusts contrast and brightness depending on usage - Office Work, Image Viewing, Entertainment, Economy, and Off. Each has some merit save for the ‘entertainment’ option, which we would avoid, as that simply shoves up the brightness but blows out colours at the lighter end. If you really need to optimise for video choose another setting and darken the room.

Philips includes some customisation software on a CD in the box called SmartControl II, which includes a wizard that lets you set up the monitor for brightness, contrast, white point and gamma, with some helpful full screen test images.

These are actually similar to our own DisplayMate tests, which showed that the 2251 doesn’t offer much in the way of low-end detail in darker areas, not is particularly bright at the top end. The backlighting also wasn’t perfectly even, with darker streaks on full screen reds. However, for text is was perfectly sharp.

Not surprisingly at the price, the screen is based on TN technology and as such, colours and contrast are lost as you move off axis. If you do need to share your image you’re better off taking advantage of its rotating stand. In addition, the monitor also has height adjustment, which is welcome at this price, and can tilt forward and back too.

At the rear you’ll find both DVI and VGA sockets, though there’s no direct button for this and it is the work of six button presses. You’ll also find a slot for a Kensington lock. On the left hand side, there's a USB port though as it’s just the one, it's more for convenience than actually giving you anything extra.

There’s also an audio input, though predictably the speakers are not up to much. It’s fine for the beeps of Office and the occasional YouTube video but not if you want to listen to music for extended periods. Usefully a headphone socket is located underneath the bezel.

The Philips Brilliance is a decent office monitor, but for the money there are displays that offer better image quality and while the PowerSensor is a good idea on paper, we're not convinced that a regular power down mode won't do the job just as well.

Author: Benny Har-Even

Philips Brilliance 225B monitor review