LG's UltraFine 5K Display Becomes Useless When It's Within Two Meters of a Router (9to5mac.com)

The LG UltraFine 5K Display was designed in part by Apple to work with the New MacBook Pro and as a replacement for the Thunderbolt Display, which was discontinued late last year. According to 9to5Mac, the display apparently wasn't designed to work next to routers as it will flicker, disconnect, or freeze computers when it's within two meters of a router due to electromagnetic interference. The Verge reports: In emails to 9to5Mac, LG acknowledged the problem -- which LG says isn't an issue for any of its other monitors -- noting that routers "may affect the performance of the monitor" and that users should "have the router placed at least two meters away from the monitor" to avoid issues. Once the monitor was moved into a different room away from the router, 9to5Mac says the issues subsided. Despite the fact that it's insane to require a router to be far away from what is likely the main computer in your home, there's been no indication that LG is working on a fix for the issue, which may be more troublesome.

Comments

Router?

[Scutter]

When did we start calling wireless access points "routers"? Oh, sure, I know lots of consumer routers have access points built in, and maybe I'm just being pedantic, but come on already. We already use the word "router" for something and we already had a perfectly good word for "access point". I had to dig through three articles before I learned what the actual problem was.

FTC, not FCC, for two reasons

[raymorris]

There are two reasons this doesn't run afoul of the FCC rules on harmful interference.

First, "routers may effect the monitor". The monitor isn't *causing* interference, it's having problems because the *router* is causing interference with the monitor (which the monitor isn't protected against). The "accepting interference" clause means LG (or their customers) can't sue whoever is causing the interference.

Second, it's actually perfectly legal and normal for your wifi to interfere with mine (or with my monitor) because we're both on the same level, the third-level priority called "unlicensed". What an unlicensed evice may NOT do is interfere with users at the "primary" or "secondary" levels, which are licensed levels. A secondary user, such as a mobile phone operator, may not cause harmful interference to a primary user, such as an ambulance service.

Re:This seems strange

[AmiMoJo]

5k at 27" is actually the ideal size and resolution.

The de-facto standard for computer displays is 96 DPI. A 24" monitor with 2k resolution (1920x1080) has around 96 DPI. Everything looks about the right size on screen, the size it was designed to look good at.

If you move up to 4k then ideally you want 200% scaling. Double every pixel. That way things will at least look no worse than a 2k monitor, and vector images like fonts will be nice and sharp. So 4k at 24" is the ideal. All these 27" and 32" 2k monitors require awkward scaling ratios of 175% or 150% and end up looking crap.

Apple knows this which is why they always go for 2x the old resolution with their "retina" displays. The ideal 96 DPI resolution at 27" is 2560x1440, which doubled gives you 5k. This monitor is the right size and resolution.

Re:Shielding?

[AmiMoJo]

It's not USB-C that is the problem, it's Thunderbolt. USB 3.1 supports up to 10Gb/sec through a USB-C connector. Thunderbolt pushes that up to 40Gb/sec. So naturally cables designed for USB 3.1 compliance are not designed to be run at 4x the data rate, meaning you need special cables certified for Thunderbolt 3 use which look the same and have the same connector as USB 3.1 cables do. Even worse you have cheap USB-C cables and adapters that are only designed for 5Gb/sec or even 0.5Gb/sec.

Naturally Thunderbolt 3 cables very, very expensive. Therefore people will naturally try to use much cheaper USB cables, and often they will work. The whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen.