LG C-series 42" OLED as an external Mac monitor

[Apple Fanboy333]

(Already posted it on Reddit but am posting here as well to get input from MacRumors users.)

Do any of you use a 42" LG C3, C4 or C5 as a productivity monitor for your Mac? If so, how is your experience with text clarity, screen size, burn-in, and overall usability?

I've already gone through a bunch of Reddit threads about the C-series as a desk monitor, but most of them revolve around PC gaming, and less about productivity work. So I'm asking here since Mac users often have high standards when it comes to text clarity, usability, and overall picture quality.

For reference, I'm currently using a 40" ultrawide 5K2K monitor for UI/UX and visual design work. I do 80 % work, and 20 % gaming/entertainment on my setup.

 

[waydabber]

Hi there,

I am currently using a 42" LG G5 OLED daily as a monitor for coding. I think it's great.

- I used mini-LED before for years and tried to avoid OLED as I had fears about brightness levels. I now think this was unfounded. Actually with some tweaking brightness is amazing (including full screen white) and totally usable in a bright room.
- I have a 80cm desk and the display pushed to the back of the desk the size feels nice (note: I used all kinds of display sizes, 24", 27" 4K, 32", 55" 8K, 42" 4K). I currently use 3072x1728 HiDPI (120Hz) for coding/productivity which gives a nice GUI size and still appropriate details.
- With an M3/M4 Mac using HDMI startup/standby also works great (newer Macs can turn the TV on/off using HDMI-CEC). The display wakes up and goes to sleep super-quickly (I have a lot of monitors and tested a lot and actually the TV's performance is outstanding in this regard). The image is crisp, the subpixel layout feels ideal for macOS.
- Of course HDR and watching videos look amazing.
- I turned off all available OLED protection features (dimming, pixel shifting etc), so I am not sure about long term effects of burn-in. But the OLED C5s are available for a great price so even if it gets some burn in here-and-there after a few years, I feel it does not matter that much, it will probably be still totally fine for watching TV.
- If you download BetterDisplay, it has free integration for LG TVs - meaning you will be able to control volume, brightness with your Apple keyboard, control contrast and saturation, sync power status (if your Mac is not HDMI-CEC capable) over the network from your Mac + has a menu option to enter the TV's service menu where you can disable some of the advanced OLED protections if you want to do so. Previously using an LG TV as monitor had some downsides (like no DDC support for proper control and the need to manually turn the TV on/off) but with all this stuff it does not matter anymore.

Let me know if you are interested in how to configure an LG OLED TV for best performance as a computer monitor (having the optimal brightness settings, no chroma subsampling for best image quality etc). There are of course various tutorials out there as well.

 

[enc0re]

I use a 42" C2 LG OLED and the experience has been good. I also use BetterDisplay. I needed the paid version to keep the color at 10-bit. Without it, anytime the display went to sleep, macOS would go back to 8-bit 4:2:0 which made text look bad.

@waydabber I did not realize that you can control volume using BetterDisplay. Could you post instructions on this and anything else that you think is useful or cool?

 

[waydabber]

Hi @enc0re - just go to the the display's settings and under Device Control select "Add Controller..." and select "LG webOS".

Then you can enter the display's IP address, pair the app to the display and configure control as you see fit:

Regarding color mode, make sure you use RGB or YCbCR 4:4:4 (either is fine, RGB is the best). I assume you configured 4:4:4 mode on the TV.

Although if control is configured, the app will switch to combined brightness control (0-50% will be software dimming, 50-100% OLED Pixel brightness control), but you might want to turn off "Prefer hardware brightness control" in the app under Device control settings (next to Contrast and Saturation controls) - this will move the hardware (OLED pixel) brightness control under the Device Control menu and leave the main slider software-only which is completely fine for an OLED.

Let me know if this does not work.

 

[enc0re]

Thanks! It took me a while longer than expected to figure it out. First you have to turn on "Enable integration features...". And then it turns out there is a common glitch (that affected me) where "Additional controllers" isn't displayed right away. You have to quit and restart BetterDisplay.

 

[Non-Euclidean]

And check this out:

https://www.tomsguide.com/tvs/i-replaced-my-pc-monitor-with-the-lg-c4-oled-and-im-never-going-back

 

[waydabber]

Thanks! It took me a while longer than expected to figure it out. First you have to turn on "Enable integration features...". And then it turns out there is a common glitch (that affected me) where "Additional controllers" isn't displayed right away. You have to quit and restart BetterDisplay.

Hmm. The "Enable integration features" should not be needed for the "Additional controllers" section - it should be there always (just re-checked the code as well to be sure there is no bug there). Are you on the latest v4.1.1 version? Maybe during the quit and restart the latest update was applied.

 

[enc0re]

Hmm. The "Enable integration features" should not be needed for the "Additional controllers" section - it should be there always (just re-checked the code as well to be sure there is no bug there). Are you on the latest v4.1.1 version? Maybe during the quit and restart the latest update was applied.

I want to say that I was on the latest version. It's difficult to confirm retroactively. I will say that I bought Pro on Black Friday weekend. I would imagine entering the license key would have made me update if I hadn't yet. I can also say with very high certainty that there was no notification that an update was installed when I quit and restarted BetterDisplay. In general, I'm also an "update right away" kind of person. So I would assume that I installed 4.1.1 right when it came out.

I can offer the following screenshots I took when "Additional Controllers" wasn't displaying. Perhaps you can divine from them what version I was on. The first was with integration features turned off. The second with integration features turned on but "Additional Controllers" not yet displaying. At that point I asked Google Gemini for help which mentioned that I should quit and restart BetterDisplay. That's when "Additional Controllers" showed up. Based on your writing, I have turned integration features back off yet the "Additional Controllers" continues to be available.