Not always this clean, but thought I'd clean up and share with the class 😊
This is an example of what my monitors are usually displaying.
Items:
>Disclosure: I received this monitor for free from LG during this event, with the intention that I'd review it twice. That said, I'm genuinely excited about this product. I would have bought it myself, and I'm approaching this review with that mindset.
>Second disclosure, the code in my screenshot is mine. This desk/setup is also used in my day job, I would never share my employers code, but I'm fine sharing my own code for review purposes here.
These are first impressions after about 2 weeks of use, primarily at work. I game occasionally at my desk, but usually I'm on console on the couch, or handheld. If you want a gamer's review, YouTube has plenty. This one is focused on productivity.
My prior setup was a 32" 4K monitor in the center with a vertical 27" 4K monitor to the right, and my MacBook open below both. The two monitors were 2020-era LG IPS panels at 60Hz (32UK650 and 27UK600). They served me well, and I've recommended them to peers more than once.
I work from home doing iOS software development. For a few years I've had my mind on the Dell U4025. The idea of a 5K2K monitor, one uninterrupted screen, sounded enticing. Multiple windows side by side is extremely helpful for my work, and even a 32" 4K monitor can feel limiting at times. A second monitor to the side helps, but a single huge display was intriguing in a different way.
Enter the LG UltraGear evo 39GX950B.
My day consists of Xcode, GitHub, Claude, and Teams, mostly in light mode during normal hours. My office doesn't get direct sun on the monitor, but it's bright enough that I run it at 100% the whole time, brighter than the LG IPS monitors I had before.
So what's it like living with 5K2K resolution? I love it. The first two-thirds of the screen usually holds Xcode with 2-3 tabs open; when I need it, I can maximize Xcode across the whole screen for 4 tabs. The last third is usually reserved for whatever else I'm doing: Claude, the simulator, GitHub.
This resolution and screen size is an absolute luxury. I don't think I'll be able to go down in size willingly again.
Text clarity is very good. I briefly tried the Alienware AW3225 QD-OLED and returned it almost immediately over text fringing, noticeable in light mode, terrible in dark mode.
On this monitor, that's a non-issue. I read small text on it regularly, and the sub-pixel layout seems better suited to it than the Alienware's.
This is my first OLED desktop monitor, and my first high-refresh-rate monitor not attached to my Mac. You don't need crisp blacks for productivity, but there's something satisfying about seeing black where it should be instead of gray. That's especially true as more of my other devices (MacBook, iPhone, my still-gorgeous LG G2 TV) have gone OLED or Mini-LED, while my desktop stayed stuck in the last decade. This monitor fixes that.
I won't be disabling any OLED care features. They run when I step away from the desk, and I've never been interrupted by one or sat waiting on one to finish.
Whether I'm burning in this monitor is something neither this review nor my follow-up later this summer will be able to answer definitively. I move windows around, but plenty stays static: the menu bar, the dock, my day-to-day window placement. I also run it at 100% brightness. I'll keep an eye on it over the next few years.
I've also seen enough from outlets like Monitors Unboxed to know that even a worst-case OLED productivity scenario isn't unusable. I'm not planning to torture-test this thing the way they do, so I can be reasonably confident it'll hold up for a long time, maybe not 10 years, but I've never kept a monitor that long anyway.
I mostly have my prior LG IPS monitors to compare against, and those did well in my office. Some OLEDs struggle with brightness, but whole-screen SDR brightness here is really good. At 100%, it's notably brighter than the IPS monitors I used before. LG markets "ultra-high brightness," and in my bright office, I believe it.
That brightness comes with a cost: the monitor runs warm. I don't believe it has a fan, since I haven't heard one and I'm sensitive to fan noise, but on long days it gets hot, up to 110°F by my measurement. That's a mild longevity concern, but I wouldn't trade a hot fanless display for a fan I'd have to listen to.
Before software development, I had an eye for graphic design, and I specifically sought out LG in the past because Apple used them for color-accurate displays. I can tell when a monitor's color is off.
Colors here are vibrant and punchy when you want them to be. My background leans toward accurate over punchy, and I acknowledge this is a gaming monitor while my prior ones were professional-grade, a different target market and a different bias on my part. Still, I'm happy with the out-of-box profiles, and I may pick up a calibration tool to dial it in further.
One quirk, apparently common to LG OLEDs: a subtle off-axis green shift. Dead center, color is great; lean to one side and the far edge shifts slightly green. I've only noticed it in light mode with lots of white on screen (Xcode, Claude); in dark mode it's a non-issue. Not sure if it's inherent to the panel tech, but it's not bothersome. Worth knowing if you'd obsess over it.
HDR is a more complicated story. Day to day I run this in SDR. I know monitors like the Apple Studio Display XDR can run HDR full-time, with SDR looking normal and HDR content just working, but I haven't gotten that here.
It's not critical to me; HDR mainly matters for games, and my primary use is productivity. I'm holding off on a full verdict until I've had gaming time and explored the HDR modes further.
LG markets this monitor as being able to hit 1500 Nits of brightness and I'm excited to see these highlights when I dig deeper into using this monitor with HDR. I don't suspect I'll see it much in my day to day, but who knows, maybe I'll be surprised!
Only time will tell if 40 hours a week of Xcode does this monitor in. But I have reasons to be optimistic:
This monitor was at the top of my list. Its closest competitors, the LG 40U990A and Dell U4025, are equal or higher in price and arguably better suited to my exact use case. I did try the 40U990A for a few weeks, a story for another time, and enjoyed it, but came away wanting an OLED future, not an LCD-backlit one. Its backlight bleed reared its head often, and while I liked the built-in Thunderbolt dock, its fan was heard constantly and annoying.
The 39GX950B has none of those issues. It's a beautiful display, and I'm excited to write more about it later this summer.
Alrighty, I’m going to try to keep this short but here is a spoiler if you want to skip to the end. >!In summary I found a bug with my Apple TV 4K gen 2 that was solved by using the first gen 4K remote. Sharing to help others and inquire what other solutions might exist !<
The players in this story.
Background I picked up a Sonos Arc to replace my HomePod mini stereo pair. Up until this point, using the gen 2 Siri Remote was flawless for years. It turned on the tv and the Apple TV, volume adjusted perfectly. Plugged in the arc and it worked once. Next time I used it, any time I would use my Siri Remote, the volume would drop to zero. It wouldn’t mute, the g2 acted as if I was tapping the volume down button beyond the point of zero volume. What’s also very annoying is the volume indicator remained on screen for this entire time and would reappear every time I used the remote. No matter what I did with the remote, the tv thought I was tapping the volume down button.
Trouble shooting So that’s weird, time to figure would wtf is going on. Here are some more weird symptoms.
A few things I tried, none of which worked
I was resigned to sticking with the HomePods or exclusively using my iPhone as a remote. They are actually comparable to the arc but that’s not the point here lol.
But here’s something else that fixed this issue. I pulled out an old Siri Remote, the one which originally came with the first gen Apple TV 4K. That remote does not have this issue! I’m a little terrified that it was on an older firmware and now that it has a connection to an Apple TV again this one too will break.
But for now. Curious if anyone else has run into this and if there is another solution?