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A new LG 5120 × 2880 monitor is causing electronic suffering:
The spiritual successor to Apple's Thunderbolt Display, the LG UltraFine 5K monitor, which only started shipping out from the Apple online store this week, appears to suffer from a major fault: when placed within two metres (6.5ft) of a wireless router, the display starts to flicker; move it really close, and the monitor goes black and becomes unusable. An LG Electronics support person confirmed the issue, saying it "only happens for the 5K monitors we have, not other LG monitors."
If that wasn't bad enough, 9to5Mac's Zac Hall reports that his LG 5K monitor, under the duress of a nearby Wi-Fi router, can freeze the MacBook Pro that it's plugged into, forcing a reboot to bring it back. When he moved the router (an Apple AirPort Extreme) from beside the monitor to another room, everything went back to normal.
A support rep for LG Electronics confirmed that the 5K monitor can be adversely affected by a nearby wireless router and said that the issue doesn't affect any other LG monitors. Hall was asked to place the router "at least 2 metres away" from the monitor and "to let us know" if the problem still persists after that.
(Score: 4, Informative) by bradley13 on Wednesday February 01 2017, @04:41PM
If it's subject to radio interference, likely covering the back with aluminum foil would also solve the problem (assuming the router is behind the screen).
Of course, standard, computer-related radio signals shouldn't interfere with standard computer equipment. Some QA engineer needs to find a new job.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @04:51PM
Does the frequency with which 5K-display pixels need to be updated correlate with the frequency of said router? Perhaps all monitors are affected, but the noise margins of lower-resolution devices are large enough to ignore the interference*
* I'm talking out of my ass, of course.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @12:02AM
Not really. Figure 5 kilopixels wide, and square that for 25 Mpx (yes, that's a significant overestimate); at 60 fps, that's 25*60 = 1500 Mpx/s, or a pixel clock around 1.5 GHz (and, at 24 bits, 36Gb/s throughput).
But the thing is, you can't drive that much data over VGA, DVI, or similar, where the link rate is directly tied to the pixel clock -- DisplayPort is AFAIK the only suitable connection, and it runs at discrete signaling rates (so far, 1.62, 2.7, 5.4, and 8.1 Gbit/s -- we've passed WiFi a while ago); the link just sits idle when it doesn't have pixels to push. So a 4k, 120Hz monitor will be using the same 8.1 Gbps signaling rate as a 5k, 60 Hz; if we don't hear about similar interference issues from other monitors, then it's probably not something to do with the signaling rate; but a simple case of cheaping out or screwing up EMI shielding.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday February 01 2017, @05:12PM
Why blame QA? Without evidence to the contrary, my first instinct is ALWAYS to blame management. Maybe you've never heard of Dilbert.
Engineers tend to make management aware of technical problems. (Unless management creates an environment that doesn't allow this.) Once aware of the problem, management either fixes it, ignores it, or pressures people to say that it's not that big of a problem, it can be worked around, and only some customers will be affected, etc etc and the rationalization goes on and on.
The higher up you go in the organization the more the attitude is that we can absolutely shoot the company in the foot if it will just make this quarter's numbers. We'll worry about the damage later. That will be in a whole different quarter.
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 01 2017, @05:47PM
Engineers tend to make management aware of technical problems.
Yeah about that...
I wonder how it got past FCC cert, maybe falsified. My gut level guess is its clean enough to pass in general but noisy as hell in the ISM bands. Engineer is like who cares passing is passing. Nobody notices wifi runs in ISM bands. Needless to say thats why the wifi doesn't work. Whoops. Yeah yeah theoretically management knows what its doing and has final responsibility etc.
I've been fighting EMI/EMC battles since I got into ham radio in the 80s. Reciprocity, a lack of bypassing on an interface or lack of shielding or fast clock edges in digital logic both radiate and rx interference equally well. I used to own a CRT Sony TV (a 13 inch trinitron, IIRC) where 5 watts on the 2-meter band a foot away would piss off the switching power supply so badly it would shut off. Also I had a CRT monitor back when 800x600 was high def and they still used relays for multi-sync frequencies where transmitting 30 watts or so of packet radio on 2-meter band 50 feet away would make the screen wiggle and the multi-sync relays chatter hilariously and annoyingly. Of course reciprocity meant those two got even and interfered pretty well with my radio reception. There are exceptions like non-linear interference. Back in the old days before class-D/E amplifiers hifi outputs were bipolar transistors which would act as rectifiers and speaker cables make great HF antennas so no 5 cent bypass capacitor meant no music while I transmitted, annoying. My sister was not amused that if I was doing ham radio she was not able to listen to ABBA or WTF girls listened to in the 70s/80s. I could have fixed that with a 5 cent bypass capacitor but you know sibling rivalry...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday February 01 2017, @06:45PM
The way I read it is that the monitor is not emitting EMI but is way too sensitive to signals emitted by routers. Enough so that it causes the display to flicker. The flickering within the monitor is affecting some high power components in the monitor at a frequency that unintentionally is so noisy and powerful that it can affect a near by MacBook. Maybe I misread.
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(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Wednesday February 01 2017, @07:41PM
"reciprocity" is the key-word you missed.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Wednesday February 01 2017, @08:45PM
The law says that a device can't interfere with other devices, or complain about certified devices interfering with it.
My last TV was a 42' Trinitron flat screen tube. If the stereo speakers (I have large ones) were within a foot of the TV, it would make rainbows on the sides of the screen, from the speaker magnets pulling on the electron beam inside the tube. Of course, magnets don't affect LEDs.
I only had two LG devices: a flip phone (this was over a decade ago) and its warranted replacement. The picture would often be upside down, or backward, or all white or black when you opened it. They replaced it under warrantee, and the replacement was even worse.
I shy away from them now.
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(Score: 2) by Jerry Smith on Thursday February 02 2017, @07:50AM
Despite their shortcomings, I've always felt that they were sincere in structural errors. Same goes for Samsung, their battery troubles were immediately recognised and they pulled the product from the market. Something I find missing with Apple. Still buying LG products, even the G4 although it was already known that their phones are infamous with their bootloops.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @10:18PM
Why blame QA? Without evidence to the contrary, my first instinct is ALWAYS to blame management. Maybe you've never heard of Dilbert.
You should blame management to the same extent that you should credit management for when there is a success. If "the hard working engineers made the iPhone a success," then "the hard working engineers allowed the Samsung Note 7 debacle to occur." Vice versa, too.
I think that engineers don't give management enough credit for the hard work they do. It's easy to talk in the abstract about making the perfect product, but that's given infinite time and money. At some point, somebody needs to cut corners to get the thing out the door, and nobody likes being the one to stick their neck out and say, "Well... 8.52 grams is out of spec, but it's good enough," "the users will live with a 1% chance of a 2 minute page load," and "it's all well and good, but users would rather have flash working than the 4000 CPUs problem you are more interested in solving [xkcd.com]."
Management should absolutely get some of the blame... but they (probably) weren't evil or even incompetent. They just made the wrong choice here, as did the system architects, the electrical engineers, the testers, and numerous other people.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @11:41PM
At some point, somebody needs to cut corners to get the thing out the door
In this case, management decided that making sure that the damned thing would continue to work when placed near something like a wireless access point just wasn't a priority.
How can somebody blame them? Nothing's perfect! Caveat emptor!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 02 2017, @01:20AM
my first instinct is ALWAYS to blame management. Maybe you've never heard of Dilbert
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 01 2017, @05:14PM
I agree. My router is next to the wall between the livingroom and garage. I taped foil sheets on the wall in the garage to keep my neighbor from stealing my no password guest wifi, it works. The signal on that side drops considerably.
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