Philips 436M6

Beautiful, but only from a distance.

- Jeremy Laird

CONVERTING AN HDTV into a large-scale PC monitor—which is basically what Philips has done with the 43-inch 436M6—isn’t a new idea, but nor is it necessarily a bad one. That’s especially true if it’s done well. Happily, Philips has good form in this area.

In the 1080p era, HDTV conversions had limited appeal; a 2K pixel grid stretched over 40-plus inches of LCD panel made for big, fat, ugly pixels. Today’s UHD or 4K sets, however, have plenty when it comes to pixels. TV tech of late also matches or beats the best monitors in other areas. Thanks to broad adoption of various HDR standards in the mainstream TV market, wider color spaces and supercharged contrast capability is becoming the norm.

TV prices also look like amazing value compared to monitors, in no small part thanks to the economies of scale in what is a far larger consumer market. The challenge, then, for this panel, is to deliver all that next-gen UHD and HDR TV goodness along with critical optimizations for monitor usage, at a price that makes a lot of conventional monitors look expensive.