Review: Philips PowerSensor 22in monitor

The most significant factors for most people when buying a monitor are size and price. For some, particularly gamers or entertainment buffs watching movies through their PC, features such as resolution, response time, inputs and quality can also come into the equation.

Philips has added another factor worth considering with the launch of the 225B1 Brilliance LCD monitor, namely power consumption. This monitor uses the company's PowerSensor technology to put the screen into a low power mode the second you move away from it, making it ideal for environmentally and budget conscious users.

Apart from this feature, the 225B1 is a pretty standard 22in LCD display, with a 16:10 widescreen aspect ratio, typical contrast ratio of 1,000:1, an average 5ms response time and a native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050. This puts it squarely in the middle of monitor specifications, so gamers and users requiring very high quality displays will probably want to look elsewhere.

Philips has an excellent reputation for building high quality displays, but we were a little disappointed with the picture from the 225B1. It wasn't bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a little below what we would usually expect from the company.

Useful presets
That said, the specifications highlight that this monitor is aimed primarily at fairly standard users, and it is certainly up to the tasks required by most people. It does include a number of useful preset configurations for use in the office, watching video or other typical scenarios.

The build is solid and the 225B1 uses an adjustable stand, so that setting the optimal height and angle isn't a problem. Input can be from a VGA or a DVI cable, but there is no HDMI, component or s-video input, once again highlighting the entry level nature of the model.

The 225B1 embeds a pair of 7W speakers in the base of the display, although the lack of a headphone jack means that only home users or those with their own office will probably connect them up.

Strangely, while Philips has included USB support with the 225B1, it has only built in a single USB socket rather than the usual two. This means that, aside from a bit of extra convenience, little benefit is gained as you have to use a USB port on the PC to run the cable connecting it to the monitor.

Power saving
Of course, it's the PowerSensor technology, rather than the specifications, that makes this stand out from the competition.

The power saving is handled by two small infrared sensors below the display, which are used to detect whether someone is sitting in front of the monitor. As soon as it thinks no-one is there, it powers down the display to draw up to half of the normal power used.

The effects are instantaneous, so you don't have to wait until the PC's power saving kicks in and turns off the display. Not only does this save money on energy bills, but it prolongs the life of the display as well.

The sensitivity can be configured to detect the presence of an object between 30cm and 120cm from the screen, so it doesn't matter if you prefer to sit with your nose to the screen or with it out of arm's reach.

Once you have it set up correctly, the system works very well. Within a second or two of moving away from the screen it immediately dims and a message appears letting you know it's in power saving mode.

According to our power meter, during normal use the monitor draws between 26W and 32W depending on the brightness. This consistently drops to around 19W when it enters the power saving mode so, although not quite the half power claimed by Philips, the saving is still significant.

One potentially annoying flaw is that if you want to watch a video, presentation or other media at a distance from the screen the power saving still kicks in, so you'll have to switch off the sensors every time you want to do this. We would like to have seen one of the preset display profiles have the power saving disabled as default to help get around this problem.

Philips has created a dedicated web site for its PowerSensor technology, which lets you calculate how much energy/money you would save after entering how much time you spend on meetings, calls, coffee breaks, lunch and other non-computational activities, as well as your location.

Apart from perhaps being a little bigger than most office monitors, at first glance the Philips PowerSensor 225B1 is a typical example of the type of screen you would see in just about every workplace around the world.

However, with the amount of time most people spend in meetings and away from their desks during a working day, the instant on/off nature of these displays could quickly turn into some real cost savings as well as bolstering a company's green credentials.