Philips 242B1G - 24 inch FHD Monitor, 75Hz, 4ms, IPS, Speakers, USB Hub, Height Adjust, Green Monitor ((1920 x 1080, 250 cd/m², HDMI/VGA/DP/DP)

This is the second of these monitors I have bought, so I am pretty happy with them, but there are some definite gotchas for Mac users to be aware of.The first was for bought a MacBook Pro 13in M1 a couple months ago, it's connected with USB-C and it's pretty much perfect in day to day use. I use it at default resolution ("looks like 1920x1020" but this is Retina mode ie super-sharp). No problems at all except once I had to power cycle the monitor because the RJ45 Ethernet port stopped working.The second was from Amazon Warehouse, wouldn't be surprised to find it was the one the other reviewer here had returned. In regard to that point about "fuzzy text especially emails, and transparent top menu" in scaled mode, when I first powered it up this display was dreadful, with colour leaking from text glyphs and the transparency effect of Big Sur OS looked, well, totally awful.The fix for this was to dig around the menus a bit; brightness was at 100% (!), contrast was set <40%, and it was using one of the "smart" display modes. I turned the smart display mode off, set brightness and contrast to 50%, and it's now looking lovely, like my other one of these monitors.Now to the gotchas and gremlins. This second monitor is connected to a top-end i9 MacBook Pro (2019) alongside a 24in 4K Dell; I wanted the larger display because my failing eyesight doesn't love small text any more, and my good experiences using the first of these 279P1s with the M1 Macbook led me to want another.Firstly: it does NOT like it if the other monitor is connected to a USB-C hub/dock that provides power. If both the 279P1 and the other USB-C hub/dock are both providing power, the Macbook will recognise the presence of both but it will not send a video signal to the Philips monitor. My guess is that the mechanism by which it detects (and disables) a second power adaptor plugged into the Macbook is the problem here.Secondly: connecting via HDMI, the default display resolution is nuts. It's like bigger than 5K, with no scaling. Text is way too small therefore. This is easy to rectify via Display settings, but there is no such problem when the USB-C connection is used for the Philips monitor (I changed the Dell to an un-powered hub/dock).What remains to be seen is whether 65W is enough to keep the Macbook Pro 16in alive (it usually asks for more). But let's see. So far so good.

I was looking for a 2k, 27 inch screen with USB-C hub capabilities.This screen is the best blue for money package I could find for at least £100 less than the ASUS equivalent at time of purchase (Asus ProArt PA278CV), although I feel prices are all a bit on the high side at the moment and it doesn't feel like its quite worth TWICE the cost of the good 27 inch HD 1080p monitor I already have.That said, usual swift delivery, good sharp screen resolution, plenty of menu adjustment options, height adjustable stand and plenty of connection options too (including one of very few monitors I could find with DP in and DP out for future daisy chaining). But for now the main benefit of this product in addition to 2k is the USB-C connection with pass through. Now only one cable (note: Thunderbolt USB-C) required to connect my work laptop for charging, internet connection and all peripherals. My only nit pick is the odd placement of 2 USB ports on the side of the monitor, which looks untidy when I've plugged in all the kit necessary for my home office set up.

The quality of the panel is great, with excellent colour, consistent brightness, great viewing angles, and overall very pleasant to look at for extended periods of time. The stands the monitor come with are a bit disappointing, because they wobble a little and the cable management is limited. However the USB-C docking feature and DisplayPort 1.2 linking/daisy-chaining are both excellent features and would thoroughly recommend for anyone with a USB-C/Thunderbolt equipped laptop as it keeps the cable management really simple, you could pay upwards of £100 for a stand-alone dock of similar functionality. The USB-C port also works well as a charger for other devices (e.g. Sony headphones or Logitech MX Master 3 mouse).

First, the bad thing. I have a MB Pro M2 Max 16", and the monitor is not able to give stable power over USB-C/Thunderbolt connection. If the battery is fully charged, the monitor connects and works well until battery gets a bit discharged (due to MacOS optimized charging) or until some intensive work is loading the CPU. At this point monitor begins disconnecting and connecting back, until it gives up and says there is no signal. The same happens immediately if I plug the monitor into my Mac after it's been used for a while on battery and the latter is somewhat discharged. Basically, I'm almost never able to have my Mac connected via single cable, and have to also connect Mac's power supply. But this is tricky too, because once I have Mac's power supply connected, the monitor refuses to connect. You need to plug in the monitor first, catch the moment when the monitor connects for a second, and then plug additional power before the monitor disconnects. It looks like there is some issue with the power delivery negotiation between MacBook and the monitor. The monitor is technically able to supply up to 90W of power (I tried corresponding setting in the monitor to maximize the output power), which is more than enough to power this laptop. Also, the monitor works with no problems with non-Apple laptops with Intel chips (which are way more power hungry).As for the picture, it's rather fine for an IPS screen. You will see glowing strips in the dark when the screen is "black", which is a common thing.As for text clarity, note, that MacOS uses rather dumb (IMHO) approach to scale image: they support fixed resolutions, which must be multiples of 2, and if monitor's physical (or system-set virtual) DPI is somewhere in between of "standard" DPIs, rendered image is simply scaled as a bitmap to needed size. This includes text. So that means, if you set "Larger Text" scale (not to say about custom virtual resolutions) in MacOS settings, the text may look blurry. This approach differs significantly from how it works in Windows: Windows scales everything during rendering, using antialiasing when, say, text's scaled pixel is rendered using more than one physical pixels, and this looks way more sharp compared to scaling rendered text as a bitmap. Apple font nerds usually state that Windows distorts fonts because of this anti-aliasing (so that they are sharp, but have a bit distorted shape), while MacOS renders them very precisely. But who cares about precision, if your text looks blurry, huh? Turns out, the best way to get sharp text on MacOS on high DPI displays is to get a 5K monitor, which is produced by Apple and a couple of more brands, and are rather expensive and exotic.As an acceptable workaround, if you need bigger fonts in the system, with minimum blur, the last MacOS version allows you to configure bigger fonts in Accessibility->Display-Text settings. This kind of "scales" text before rendering, so it looks way better.I appreciate that this monitor has lots of built-in secondary features, like presense sensor, USB hub, a Gigabit Etherned network adapter, and speakers (which sound poorly, but sometimes this is better than nothing). I'm happy it has built-in power supply instead of having anoter brick hanging on the wire. And the build quality is good and better than more expensive Dells recently.The bottom line: if you're not going to use it with an Apple MacBook (except, maybe, MB Air), I would recommend this monitor. But with a MacBook, one of the most useful features (after, well, displaying image), the single cable connection, doesn't really work, and it's tricky to get it work even with external power supply. So I would NOT recommend it for Mac users.