Mike Wuerthele
LG has released a new version of its utility for owners of the company's UltraFine displays for High Sierra, bringing improvements to USB connectivity, the built-in web camera, and the integrated speakers.
According to LG, the new version 2.08 of the utility released on Sept. 22 is now High Sierra-compatible, and improves connectivity quality on the USB-C ports on any of the LG UltraFine displays. Additionally, the company has made fixes in software to the integrated camera assisting with performance in low-light conditions.
LG also notes that the speakers on the device are now more precisely controlled with the volume controls from the Mac itself, or attached keyboards.
Updates to a connected display's firmware are now handled through the utility as well. Apple recommends use of the utility on its own support page for the display.
Brief AppleInsider testing over the weekend on the utility gave mixed results. While connectivity of the rear-mounted USB-C ports with USB 2.0 speeds is better, the actual delivered speed is noticeably lower — but as the ports are intended for keyboards and mice, this may not be of significance to most users.
Volume control increments have in fact increased, but it is unclear given the relatively low wattage of the speakers in the display how much that matters, with a large jump in volume one button-press after 50 percent.
The LG Screen Manager for Mac is a 26-megabyte download from the LG support website for the Ultrafine displays.
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10 Comments
if one cable thunderbolt can't even reach USB 2 speeds what's the point?
And I wouldn't trust a company that doesn't know how to do version numbering correctly.
..any device or device-driver/kext that can randomly reboot your MacBookPro can cost you dearly: If the MacBookPro models came with ECC memory (like the upcoming iMacPro) and noasync set on its filesystems, crashes/lockups might be a simple annoyance that one would tolerate to enjoy that gorgeous 5K panel.
I'd like to see a review-site call out every manufacturer shipping stuff that causes crashes, as well as all of the RAID units out there that lack ECC memory and capacitors (capacitors delay shutdown after a power loss just long enough for the drive to flush its memory to disk so no data loss occurs)...wouldn't hurt to publish some of the real horror stories once a month too --like the lady who was backing up her novel every day only to eventually discover that the backups were all corrupted because of a bad RAM chip that only wigged out under the stress of doing backups...and the lost contract and book advance worth many times more than the extra bucks she should have spent on a MacPro.