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LG UltraFine 5K - Owners Thread

pldelisle said:
Anyone know why both 5K and 4K are not in stock anymore ? I might be interested in 2 4K, but they have virtually vanished everywhere. Are they renewing the display?
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I am also trying to get a 4K for a family member and cannot. I considered asking my biz sales person about this but I doubt they’d do anything other than try to source what is “in market.”

It is a big hole to not have mac compatible mid-market HD display available.

I’ve predicted a mid market Apple Cinema to sort of replace the Ultrafine (essentially a stand-alone of the new iMac display) but there are no rumors of such a thing.
 
- rob - said:
I am also trying to get a 4K for a family member and cannot. I considered asking my biz sales person about this but I doubt they’d do anything other than try to source what is “in market.”

It is a big hole to not have mac compatible mid-market HD display available.

I’ve predicted a mid market Apple Cinema to sort of replace the Ultrafine (essentially a stand-alone of the new iMac display) but there are no rumors of such a thing.
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appleseeder2020 said displays stay Pro only. So if there’s something it’s on LG side.
 
pldelisle said:
appleseeder2020 said displays stay Pro only. So if there’s something it’s on LG side.
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I had to look for this but here’s the link for anyone interested.

There are leaks, confidence and drama in that thread. Two things though:

What about the new iMac? That has the xdr matte option and is essentially a midmarket version of the pro display. I suppose the op means other than iMac?

That op “leaker” also says the first Apple Silicon device is a 14” Mac Pro. I personally think it will be a relaunch of the MacBook. Unrelated, but between this and not mentioning iMac I’m skeptical.
 
Best Buy has the 5K in stock FYI.

I just got the 27MDKL-B from a friend for $800 (he got a great deal on the XDR and is selling his gently) and it should arrive next week.

I sort of impulse bought it and am now concerned I would be better off with a more flexible display. Oh well. Worst case, I can flip it for the same as I bought it.

My only real concern is what this will do to my USB bandwidth on my 2020 iMac. But I guess I’ll have to wait and see if it’s an actual problem. Something for the iPad Pro to use at the very least.
 
I’ve been feeling the same since I got my bargain LG 5K recently especially as I just saw my friend’s ultra wide as well... then I actually use the lovely retina goodness and realise I can’t really go back to seeing actual pixels.
 
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The apple store near me just happened to have one in stock, and I impulse bought one of these babies. I can't believe I waited this long. The 4k monitors don't compare. Everything pops more and I am seeing detail I had never seen before. Now, if I could only have the XDR pro monitor, but I could buy two more of these babies for less price.

This monitor was a major headache to get working for in Windows even after all this years it has been out. I thought this would be plug and play by now, but not yet. I had to get the Gigabyte Titan-Ridge add in card. Luckily, my motherboard just happened to support the add in card even though I did not buy it for this purpose in mind.
 
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fgengineer said:
The apple store near me just happened to have one in stock, and I impulse bought one of these babies. I can't believe I waited this long. The 4k monitors don't compare. Everything pops more and I am seeing detail I had never seen before. Now, if I could only have the XDR pro monitor, but I could buy two more of these babies for less price.

This monitor was a major headache to get working for in Windows even after all this years it has been out. I thought this would be plug and play by now, but not yet. I had to get the Gigabyte Titan-Ridge add in card. Luckily, my motherboard just happened to support the add in card even though I did not buy it for this purpose in mind.
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(Two owned and working since rev2 Feb.2017.)

TBH, by now 5K3K displays should be freely available given it's been 4 YEARS since their first release (Nov.2016), and obviously cheaper over such time too.
Regardless of Apple not doing them separately, they still do them inside their iMacs, so where on earth are the other brands' ones by now?

Anyone with any ideas on why that's not the case with 5K's, do chime in?
 
jimthing said:
Anyone with any ideas on why that's not the case with 5K's, do chime in?
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They may not render the same way. Apple uses a scheme for resizing ui elements which replaces 1 pixel with 4. To match that to their older combination of resolution and size options, they went with 5K. Most content is some variation of 4K, so I imagine they're lacking a lot of compelling reasons to do the same thing as Apple there. In general, I expect most of these guys to stick to powers of 2. It holds in electronics quite a bit due to the way it fills address space when determining required buffer sizes.
 
jimthing said:
Anyone with any ideas on why that's not the case with 5K's, do chime in?
Click to expand...
I have two guesses.

One, these is no big push for higher resolution displays. The two biggest desktop markets are gamers and office work. Gamers seem obsessed about Hz and that is why you see monitors with 120, 200 and even up to 300 Hz now. Enterprises are to entirely happy with giving employees crappy displays. At work last year, I was still given two crappy 1080p displays that I hated.

The second guess is the connection speed needed to drive high resolution displays. HDMI 2.0 cannot handle more than 4k 60Hz. It is only just now that we are seeing sources with HDMI 2.1 that can handle more resolution. Displayport 1.4 can handle a bit more than HDMI 2.0, but that connection is still rare specially ones that support DSC that really increases the resolution it can handle.

Like I said, I was surprised at how hard it was to setup the LG 5K for Windows. I needed two displayport outputs hooked to the add in card which is then connected to the LG 5K display. For someone who is not computer adept, I don't think they would go through so much trouble. 6K would be even harder. The 8k display from Dell also needs two displayport connections.

Apple makes it look easy to connect all their displays, but they are doing a lot of custom stuff under the hood to get it working. Step out of Apple's eco system, and hooking up all this stuff is a lot more involved.
 
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fgengineer said:
The apple store near me just happened to have one in stock, and I impulse bought one of these babies. I can't believe I waited this long. The 4k monitors don't compare. Everything pops more and I am seeing detail I had never seen before. Now, if I could only have the XDR pro monitor, but I could buy two more of these babies for less price.

This monitor was a major headache to get working for in Windows even after all this years it has been out. I thought this would be plug and play by now, but not yet. I had to get the Gigabyte Titan-Ridge add in card. Luckily, my motherboard just happened to support the add in card even though I did not buy it for this purpose in mind.
Click to expand...

Yep, I've done the same with Titan-Ridge card connected to my RTX 3080 (it really is plug and play with that TB3 card). You can also control the brightness in Windows 10 using the app ClickMonitorDDC. There's another app on the Microsoft store but it didn't work for me at all.

And yes, 4K monitors don't compare to 5K. I mean come on, it's ~75% more pixels!
 
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I’m still loving my UltraFine 5K monitors. It would be hard to go back to anything with a lower resolution. I wish there were more 5K (or higher) options.
 
fgengineer said:
I have two guesses.

One, these is no big push for higher resolution displays. The two biggest desktop markets are gamers and office work. Gamers seem obsessed about Hz and that is why you see monitors with 120, 200 and even up to 300 Hz now. Enterprises are to entirely happy with giving employees crappy displays. At work last year, I was still given two crappy 1080p displays that I hated.

The second guess is the connection speed needed to drive high resolution displays. HDMI 2.0 cannot handle more than 4k 60Hz. It is only just now that we are seeing sources with HDMI 2.1 that can handle more resolution. Displayport 1.4 can handle a bit more than HDMI 2.0, but that connection is still rare specially ones that support DSC that really increases the resolution it can handle.

Like I said, I was surprised at how hard it was to setup the LG 5K for Windows. I needed two displayport outputs hooked to the add in card which is then connected to the LG 5K display. For someone who is not computer adept, I don't think they would go through so much trouble. 6K would be even harder. The 8k display from Dell also needs two displayport connections.

Apple makes it look easy to connect all their displays, but they are doing a lot of custom stuff under the hood to get it working. Step out of Apple's eco system, and hooking up all this stuff is a lot more involved.
Click to expand...
This right here. Not enough people actually want them (sure we all do - there are dozens of us, dozens!) but there is not enough demand, and the bandwidth to run them is 'too much'. I mean, I still see reviewers and forums complaining that 5k displays don't have a whole bunch of additional ports on them. They have to know that just driving 5k worth of output eats up nearly all available TB3 bandwidth, much less DP or some other lesser protocol. Add in the fact that only Apple really makes it simple and the market just isn't there.
 
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Is anyone having issues with their 5k's camera and macOS 10.15.7? I noticed that after an update, my display camera no longer functions. When I open FaceTime, Zoom, or PhotoBooth, the LED turns green, but the output is black.
 
mrpndev said:
Is anyone having issues with their 5k's camera and macOS 10.15.7? I noticed that after an update, my display camera no longer functions. When I open FaceTime, Zoom, or PhotoBooth, the LED turns green, but the output is black.
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I just opened Facetime and Photo Booth to test and it's working fine for me.
 
Screen Shot 2020-11-12 at 11.18.50 AM.png

Apparently it is up to date. But considering someone else with 10.15.7 is not having problems with their 5K's built-in camera, it sounds like it's hardware related.

Which sucks considering that I work from home and LG wants 3 weeks turnaround time.
 
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mrpndev said:
Is anyone having issues with their 5k's camera and macOS 10.15.7? I noticed that after an update, my display camera no longer functions. When I open FaceTime, Zoom, or PhotoBooth, the LED turns green, but the output is black.
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This happens to me now. I just unplug the monitor (USB-C) from laptop and plug it back in.
 
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mrpndev said:
I did that. It didn’t help.

SMC yes, not PRAM.

2017 MBP 15
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If you unplug the monitor does your machines camera work in those apps currently? If so, try a PRAM reset, 5 chimes, and then see if that does anything. If not then it may be something not related to the monitor.
 
Lucky736 said:
If you unplug the monitor does your machines camera work in those apps currently? If so, try a PRAM reset, 5 chimes, and then see if that does anything. If not then it may be something not related to the monitor.
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Yes it does. I also plugged it into my partners 13 2016 MBP and it wasn’t working. He also has Catalina 10.15.7 leading me to believe it’s an update glitch or the monitor.
 
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