I wrote this same review on a few other sites in case you are looking around, but they had character limits, so this review is a bit more in depth.
Well, here's my review of this LG 43". Let me set the stage so you can understand the context of where I'm coming from for this review.
I've been running 4x Samsung SyncMaster 930Bs since 2005 (19", 5:4); yes, that's 12 years on the same monitors. They were good for what they were and served me well. However, I finally updated my 8 year old workstation to a new Ryzen build and the time was right for a display update.
I contemplated doing 4x 27" displays in portrait, 3x 32" in portrait, or 2x 43 in landscape. I put together over 30 monitor models into a spreadsheet with every data spec and leveraged them against each other to find the optimal buy for my situation. I spent 18 months going back and forth slowly narrowing it down. In the end, due to some dimensional constraints in my studio, the 3x 32" would not fit and I wasn't sure I wanted to have 4x 27" since I was coming from 4x 19". It just felt redundant and didn't eliminate some of the issues I wanted to overcome, such as changing inputs manually on each monitor to signal a different box.
It was down to essentially the 43" " 34"; 4K displays on the market; the Acer, Dell, LG, and Viewsonic. The Acer and Viewsonic used the same TP Vision panel that seemed to have some issues with image retention, red-orange splotchy lag, and a few others. The LG and Dell both use a LG panel. What sold me was two points: 1.) The price; $650 each for the LG vs. $900 each for the Dell and 2.) the remote control.
So, I ordered my two LG's and waited a week for them to arrive. First impression: This monitor is BIG. I felt a little ridiculous when the poor UPS driver had to lug these to the door. They are the size of a medium TV really... I took them up to my studio and took one out. It still is HUGE. Plugged it in with a 15' DP cable I purchased (the max length specked by VESA for the DP interface) and there it was, glorious ginormous BIOS screen. I loaded into Win10 and it was a magnificent feeling. I'm going to say it one more time, this monitor is HUGE.
I've been using my two displays for about two months now. I have them mounted to the wall with some Ergotron LX HD Sit-Stand Wall Mount LCD Arm - Wall Mount (which I reviewed here on Amazon) and I've been loving them. They no longer seem huge, but just right. Having to use anything smaller is a struggle now. 76" @ 8K is where it's at; measuring diagonally across both displays.
So, some technical information about this display. I work a day job but run my own side business. I work in Autodesk CAD/Inventor, SolidWorks, Adobe CC (Audition, Photoshop, InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator, Dreamweaver), Corell, Inkscape/G.I.M.P./Scribus, MS Office, LibreOffice, Cubase, and some fashion CAD programs. I do a lot and need essentially a monitor that could handle it all. The only "game" I play is EverQuest 1, which is nearly a 20 year old MMORPG. It handles that perfectly fine.
I'm power these monitors with an AMD Radeon Pro WX 5100, for your reference. This card has 4x DP1.4 outputs and is capable of running 4x 4K monitors @ 60Hz. It is a professional card made for heavy work. Consumer/gaming cards will perform differently, so plan accordingly for your configuration.
This monitor is not made for precision design/graphic/motion picture/photography/etc. work. However, it can function perfectly fine in this role. The monitors came pre-calibrated with a certificate sheet in each box. I only had to do a little bit of tweaking to get them to where I needed. I also adjusted the contract and brightness down. I keep the brightness at about 30 at night and 60 during the daytime. I'm so used to using bad TN panels over the past two decades, that I calibrate my monitors and design working space for my project specific needs, illuminating the need for precision color in my work. A proper monitor for this work is always preferred, but they would have set me back over $4,000 vs. the $1,300 I paid for two of these. It wasn't worth it for me.
I'm disappointed in the lack of DisplayPort inputs, 1 is pretty pathetic, though there is a USB-C/DisplayPort input, which technically qualifies it as 2 inputs. HDMI is a proprietary input and there is a royalty that the end-user ends up paying to have it. Additionally, it's an entertainment input; I'm guessing this monitor is geared more towards the consumer than the creator. What makes it worse, is HDMI inputs 1 + 2 are only 30Hz. I'm using one of them now for an auxiliary box and it's pretty laggy. Luckily I don't care about that machine, but it's still annoying. HDMI 3 +4 do function at 4K @ 60Hz perfectly fine.
The stand does not have any height adjustment but functions fine and does its job; I tried it briefly before storing them as these displays are wall-mounted for my use.
Speakers, it has stereo sound. Perfect for the dings and pings of your operating system. Good enough for telephony, VOIP, voice audio. But if you want music or entertainment, get real speakers; in-monitor speakers are not for that. I'm happy with the speakers for OS sounds. Surprisingly, these speakers are pretty good. I've heard some pretty bad monitor speakers over the years, but you can actually enjoy music out of these. They also are very loud, unlike most monitor speakers. Don't forget, they are monitor speakers and not stand alone, so the quality will always be lacking, but I'm really impressed with them; the best monitor speakers I've ever heard.
The on/off/menu button. It's a little dongle under the monitor. I'm not crazy about it and wish there was just a few buttons on the front bezel or back instead; oh well. You can hold the dongle button for 6 seconds to shut off power, or press it up and then in to shut off. You can also change inputs using the dongle and volume/mute.
The white LED power light is pretty weak and I almost can never see it. Only visible in a completely dark room. I wish it was brighter especially since it is on the bottom of the monitor, pointing down towards your desk. In fact, it's so weak, I don't see it looking at the monitor, but instead in the reflection of my semi-gloss desk.
The remote. This was a huge selling point. I can adjust inputs much more easily with this. The downside is if you are running 2 or more of these monitors, the remotes all operate on the same frequency or channel. In other words, one remote controls all the displays! I wish it at least had a dip-switch in the battery compartment for channel 1 or 2; like many cordless ceiling fans have. It's very convenient and I love this remote! I use it all the time for input switches and for Picture-by-Picture.
PbP/PiP feature - LOVE this feature and was mandatory for my purchase. I'm running 4 boxes total and need to view different machines at different times. I can now do that easily without having to switch inputs like I had to before. The PiP feature is kind of annoying to me, since it places a rectangle over the main input; which will of course block something eventually, but the PbP feature is GREAT!
It's true, there is some strange effect occurring in about the outer most 10 pixels of the panel. If you look straight on center of the display at about 30" , you're good. As soon as you look at an angle, you notice this black line along the bezel. Either there is a reflection bouncing around inside the display, or you are seeing "through" the panel at the back bezel. I got used to it and it doesn't interfere with my UI's. See the two images I've added about this.
I have no IPS glow really, I was totally afraid of these after seeing so many bad reviews of 43", 4K monitors in general. The screen has a very low glow, as it has to since the LED's push light through the panel to illuminate it, but it's the lowest amount of glow I've seen in the few IPS monitors I've used at offices. It's pretty darn close to my old TN panels from 2005. I'm very happy.
The colors look great and doing photography retouching on such a huge screen is a dream come true. Everything is so big and clear and I can see more of an image at once. CAD files are also great since you can see so much more at once.
Pro Tip: If using Win10, you can snap windows to quadrants by bringing your window to any corner. This feature is sweet having just come from Win7 and only having the two side snap options. Makes you much more productive.
LG offers a software download for a bit more functionality including color/brightness adjustment and a more advanced snapping-type feature than what Win 10 offers. I've only used it to update the firmware on my monitors, but it could be usefull for some.
So, overall I'm completely in love with my two new screens. Hoping to have these for 10 years+ like my last monitors. Hope this review was helpful and good luck!
UPDATE 1: One year running and I still love this monitors. No issues. I've had to move recently and really wish I had gotten 32" monitors instead, but then I look at what LG has and none seem to have 4+ inputs with a remote and PBP function. So effectively, these are the best monitors on the market for me and I'll just have to keep dealing/enjoying with their hugeness.
UPDATE 2: I included two images of the mouse at the edge of the monitor to show what it looks like viewing straight on (you can fully see the mouse over the MS Start button, right up the monitor bezel) and then at an angle, essentially most of the mouse pointer "vanishes". This doesn't bother me; I've gotten use to it, but others seem to struggle with it.
It seems like the current 43" 4K monitor panels (LG, Acer, Dell, Philips, ViewSonic) currently suffers from one common issue. That be the edge of the display screen casting a shadow from a close viewing angle (2 ft). However, if you sit roughly 4 ft away, you'll get the full picture. Then everything becomes too tiny to read, unless of course you apply 200% scaling.
I believe a proper 43" 4K monitor without the shadow edge issue would've been made curved. As it's currently designed, it's curved inward, so when viewing close, we are missing viewing angle of the edges. If the monitor was designed with an outward curve, it would fix this problem.
Just an FYI:
Dell released their 43" monitor May of 2016. It is currently still the most expensive 43" monitor that is using outdated I/O ports.
Acer decided to jump in on Feburary of this year. Currently the cheapest offering in price and quality. Their target are for gamers.
LG (if you imported from Japan), Philips, ViewSonic released their display panel May of this year.
Also remember folks, always use Display Port as your input if you don't have an HDMI 2.0 output source. Otherwise you'll run into image ghosting problems due to limited bandwidth of HDMI 1.4 from the source. That source being an outdated integrated graphic processor or graphic card older than 2015. The first graphic card to support HDMI 2.0 was Nvidia's GTX 900 series.
I originally wanted to get an HDR monitor, but the ones that have been announced so far are 32" or smaller. That means at 4k you pretty much need to enable scaling. So I decided getting a 4k monitor where you wouldn't need to scale was more important. Which brings us to this monitor. It is big, bright, and beautiful. It changed the way I use the computer. Instead of alt-tabbing between windows, I have now gotten into habit of snapping windows to the sides and corners using Windows 10's built-in snapping features. Weirdly you can't snap windows to the top and bottom halves of the screens, but you can resize after snapping to a corner. I'm sure MS will add that feature in the future. Also, there are keyboard shortcuts for snapping windows to the sides but not for the corners for some reason.
Other positives: non-glossy surface, no dead pixels on my unit
Some negatives: speakers have almost no bass, some pixels on the sides of the screen can only be viewed head-on, once in a while the screen will go black for a second
I wanted to have a computer screen that was huge, 4K and doubled as a TV for my office/den. This LG monitor fills that bill nicely.
It's a near-perfect computer monitor and just as good as a 4K TV. The only slight flaw I could see what the top of the screen is slightly dimmer than the bottom, but that's not noticeable unless you really look hard.
But the screen's resolution and color rendering are excellent. On top of all that, the price was so low I was worried about quality. That concern was unfounded. Great deal, worth every penny!
I just got this to replace 2 HP 32" QHD Monitors and happy with it so far. Beautiful screen and although its not quite the InfinityEdge that Dell have, the bezel is still pretty slim. The joystick under the screen to control power and menu makes it easy to adjust settings but even easier with the included Remote. The screen split software is great and allows you to quickly change different screen configuration based on what I'm doing on the computer. I primiarily use this for photo editing (Lightroom / Photoshop) and light gaming. I have this hooked up through Displayport to an RX 480 video card. I can play NBA2k17 @ 4k smoothly which is awesome. Not a heavy gamer so the response time on this screen is fine for me. It came factory calibrated but I still calibrated the screen with Spyder4Pro anyways to get accurate colors for Photo editing.
Feature Product
- 43- inch UHD 4K (3840 x 2160) IPS monitor
- HDCP 2.2 compatible
- USB Type C connectivity
- 4x HDMI input
- On screen control with screen split
Description
The 43UD79 combines Ultra HD 4K resolution (3840x2160) with IPS clarity in a huge 43 inch class display. It offers compact, versatile USB Type-C connectivity plus it's HDCP 2.2 compatible for great content viewing options.
This is an excellent productivity tool. I just received the panel and spent the afternoon setting it up as it required a re-think of the layout of my desk due to it's large size. Having this much usable UHD screen real estate without the need for windows scaling is magical when it comes to my needs - professional video editing and photo processing. I'm not a gamer so I will not comment on that use other than the refresh rate is probably not what a hardcore gamer is after looking to invest in a panel such as this. This is clearly intended to be productivity panel and shines so far in that application. I was using dual 27" HD widesreen panels prior to this beast's arrival (yeah, I've been a little late to the UHD party.) I've attached a photo showing one of those panels turned to portrait mode to show the scale of this panel.
Some notes to potential buyers from my experience so far -
• You need to have a large desk. I recommend an absolute minimum of 30"-36" seating distance from this panel for the best viewing experience.
• The included stand is very sturdy, but offers only tilt adjustment. Having said that, I see no need to potentially place this on an adjustable arm for height adjustment. If you decide to use a monitor arm, make sure it is heavy duty as this panel is heavy!
• There is some edge shadowing which is quite common in IPS panels of this size. The further away you are, the less this is noticable which is also part of the aforementioned distance requirements.
• LG wants you to use the included cables, which was fine in my application (using Displayport on my 1080TI video card.) If you need longer cables, make sure they match the necessary specs.
• Color is very good with the factory calibration. You will most likely turn the brightness down to about 80. From the factory it is set to 100 and will most likely cause your retinas to spontaneously combust in a dark room.
• A remote is included and is a very nice touch, especially if you are running multiple video feeds to this panel through the 5 available ports.
Again, I've only had a short time with this panel but it is amazing so far. I've actually heard people shocked by how large this monitor is when they first saw it in person. Be aware, you're purchasing a YUUUUUUUUGE panel! I highly recommend for getting work done.
Bought this monitor a few weeks ago. So far, have been happy with it but there are a few things to be aware of.
When I got the monitor, I hooked it up to a computer with a mini-DisplayPort NVidia card that supported UHD/4k output resolutions. It worked fine, but as some other reviewers have noted, there would be occasional loss of signal. Several times an hour, the screen would go blank, input would be lost, and then resume about 5 seconds later. This was annoying, but since the recovery was fairly fast, it was not horrible. I could see how this would be a nonstarter for gamers though. I was only using this for productivity applications.
I contacted LG technical support, and they advised me to update the monitor firmware, which I did. Please see the following info for how to do that:
"Try to check if there is any update with the operating system and graphics card. After this, install the onscreen control 2.86. Find this using this link. http://www.lg.com/us/search.lg?search=Onscreen+control
There will be an option where you can update the firmware. Before attempting the update, Make sure that the included USB-C is connected to the monitor and the USB-C to A adapter is connected to the computer. You may need to have several attempts when failing. Try all usb ports of the computer as it is recommended to be plug in to the port that will have the highest power and data delivery. For this update make sure that the computer is connected wired to your internet to ensure data transfer quality with no interruptions."
It has been a week since I updated the firmware, and no loss of input signal as of yet. I am hopeful that this firmware update resolved the issue. I will update if that is not the case.
The only other negative about this monitor is that at the edges of the screen (specifically left and right), unless you're looking at the pixels dead-on, you won't be able to see some of them. Even with that, I'd still recommend this monitor. For the size, resolution and cost, it makes a great desktop monitor for productivity apps. I can't speak for gaming, however.
To note: I'm running the monitor hooked to a PNY NVIDIA Quadro NVS 510 2GB GDDR3 4-Mini DisplayPort Low Profile PCI-Express Video Card VCNVS510DVI-PB (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AE0EP0C) running Fedora 28 Linux with Cinnamon.
Before ordering I was very skeptical. I've been using Dell UltraSharp monitors for over 15 years and have always paid ~$1200 for my monitors. I do this as I have been known to sit in front of a screen for 12+ hrs straight and have sensitive eyes. I ended up purchasing this, as I was about to order a 27inch Dell UltraSharp for my girlfriend. But decided to order this instead, as it costed just a little more. Knowing if I did not like it, I could just give it to her. But I've decided to keep it and instead give her my Dell UltraSharp 30. This screen is simply awesome! I've had no sensitivity or tired eyes for the ~month I've had it. The resolution is simply amazing. I can fit way more code on the screen and no longer have to squint to see it. The sheer size of the screen took some getting used to, but I will never go back now. The only negative I have is, I found a single bad pixel. But without hunting for it, it would just looks like dust.
I've owned this screen 8 months now and used it as my dedicated, full-time, primary screen for work and play. As the title says, I cannot overstate how great this is for a full-time professional who values screen real estate. I run this on my Windows workstation at 100% zoom (that is, no zoom) to take full advantage of the pixels. It's so big that as long as your vision is decent, you do not need zoom/magnification. Obviously YMMV here, but that's how I run it and have been for months now. It is wonderful. As a result of this beauty I decided to go down to 2 screens from 3 because this is so much space (this one is 4k, second screen is 1440p at same DPI).
I wish I'd taken the plunge sooner. I work on my machine 8+ hours a day and can't imagine working without this anymore! I'm a software developer so I'm reading text all day, every day. No problems.
I also game quite a bit in the evenings. Some games I run in a window so that my eyes don't have to travel from edge to edge, some games I run full screen and maybe move back from the screen. It really depends on the game style, whether I play with kb/m or controller, etc.
Some reviews mention the very very border pixels being unusable because of the darkening effect. This is true, but it's a non-issue in real-world use. The edges _are_ still usable for things like scroll bars, task bar, etc, just not text you need to read. But who puts text in the 5px edge of their screen? I don't. No matter the application, that's basically window border space, anyway. I can see it if I look but never notice during typical activities. It's really nothing to worry about.
It also has a nice remote -- far better than the awful button systems that are in virtually every other monitor out there.
No dead pixels. No strange colors. No flickering. No regrets!
The initial reviews helped me see this was a solid buy. I cannot or would not go back to the old double monitor set up. This is easily the best purchase I made all year. I can have 6 web windows open across the whole screen if I wanted.
I use this on my stand up desk. It's just perfect.
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