Wednesday, February 1, 2017

My experience of the New LG 5K screen

I have a new macbook pro 2016, and an LG 5K screen that I am working with.

The LG 5K screen looks amazing!  Good quality pictures with a sky towards sunset simply look more like what I see with my eyes than anything I have seen before.  Wow.  The tiny differentiation with colors is amazing.  I'm in my 40's.  The screen makes my eyes very happy.  That is important to me!

I did have to find new ways to scale the resolution of my Windows virtual machine to make it a reasonable size and visibility.

I have used it as a power source as well; this is a welcome simplicity at my desk.  It means I can carry my power supply or take it home, as I have power from my monitor.

The camera and speakers are just fine, thank you very much.  I have not tried the microphone

Now the caveats...

On the first day, I had 5 times when things went poorly.  Three times, I had two solid colors, each taking 1/2 of the screen.  The monitor was completely unusable during this time, as a monitor and hub.  Twice things hung - the screen went black and did not recover until I unplugged it from my laptop.  Once it took 5 full minutes for my laptop to return to normal.  It did return to normal... I never had these problems again after the first day.  This is quite strange.

Using the monitor as a hub is a failure so far.  Items plugged in are not re-recognized when I plug the monitor back into my computer, so I have to unplug and re-plug them into the monitor.  This has been true for 3 devices:

  • USB-A (with USB-C adapter from Apple) HDD
  • USB-A (with USB-C adapter from Apple) Kinesys keyboard
  • USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 EZQuest Gigabit Ethernet Adapter

I hope a fix is forthcoming...

Update:  The 10.12.4 MacOS update fixed it!  I was taking my monitor to Apple the next day.  The Monitor works as a hub now.  Whew!!