Philips Brilliance BDM3490UC Ultra-wide 21:9 Curved Display Review

The joystick controls are very simple. Each direction you push the joystick in brings up a shortcut, with a press to the right displaying the main options menu that leads to the rest of the settings.

Pressing left shows the SmartImage menu of colour presets.

Press up for the Multi View menu, which gives the PIP controls.

Press down to choose the audio source, useful when running in PIP mode, so you can switch from PC audio to (for example) the audio of a games console.

Pressing right on the joystick shows the main menu. Its default screen is the all-important input selector.

Beneath this is the Picture menu, with brightness, contrast and sharpness controls. The aforementioned Picture Format control is here to force a 4:3, 16:9 or 21:9 screen format. There’s also a gamma setting with values ranging from 1.8 to 2.6 along with SmartResponse and SmartContrast.

Underneath this is a more complete PIP menu.

And an audio menu underneath this.

The Color menu lets you switch the temperature from values ranging from 5000K to 11500K.

There’s a choice of languages. The OSD Settings menu lets you adjust the OSD location, timeout and transparency.

The final menu screen called Setup lets you reset the Philips Brilliance BDM3490UC to factory settings, view information and switch DisplayPort from version 1.1 to 1.2. By default it is set to 1.1, meaning a 30Hz refresh rate and choppy mouse movement.

Setting it to 1.2 should be the first thing you do.

 We questioned why any manufacturer would leave DisplayPort 1.1 as the default option these days, but according to Philips this is to maintain support for older video cards.

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