From experience with a 55” 4K OLED as main monitor, I can attest that the length if the caveat list is not indicative of the total impact of the caveats. It’s more an indication of a thoughtful and thorough person writing the list.
I went with the LG CX model based on what I read on rtings.com
That’s a previous-generation model. I think all of the LG TVs are good.
There are / were technical caveats. I believe all of them are solved by M3 macs that have HDMI 2.1 ports. (M3 or M3 Pro or something? The ones advertised as 8K capable.) Out of the box, those will do 4K 120Hz HDR with variable refresh rate and full 444 color. This is what you want.
It is possible to get that going on older machines, except for VRR which is more of a nice-to-have anyway.
I have a 2018 Macbook Pro 15”. Disclaimer!: My setup was a “complexity pet”, a tinkering project; There are simpler ways to connect a 120Hz 4K HDR HDMI 2.1 display to a non-HDMI-2-1 mac. And! My tinkering project wasn’t only about getting the display working correctly. It was more about messing with eGPUs and virtualization and stuff. Definitely a long way round.
On my Intel mac, I use an AMD Radeon 6800 XT eGPU with Club3D or CableMatters DisplayPort-to-HDMI 2.1 adapters. Plus some EDID hacking which is easy to do.
EDID is how the display identifies itself to the OS. The EDID payload can be overridden on the OS side. Mostly it’s about copying the display’s EDID and deleting the entry that says the display can accept 4:2:0 color. Only then does macOS switch to 4:4:4 color. I also created a custom “modeline” with tighter timing to get 120Hz going fully.
—Please be assured that this was way more complex than it needed to be. It was for fun!
There are much easier ways to do this. Lots of forum posts on it. On the MacRumors forums iirc? User joevt is The Man.
And even then, what I wrote above is actually easy to do once you know it’s possible.
Mostly though you really want an M3 Mac that just has HDMI 2.1 and is ready to go.
There are/were also OLED gaming monitors available, such as from Alienware. Those have DisplayPort inputs and are ready to go with almost any older Mac. Might be able to find one for a price equivalent to a TV, idk.
I believe the discussion about text rendering is referring only to a line of very cheap TVs that do not in fact have RGB pixels. They have half RG and half GB. For "normal" video content, this is a surprisingly low quality drop. For high-contrast text it's total murder. You can see the stippling pattern as clear as day and it can easily render 8-10pt text literally illegible.
IT once accidentally bought such a TV and had it in a conference room. Took us a while to convince the relevant people that, yes, it is nominally working fine, it's not "broken" in the sense that it doesn't turn on or half the screen won't light up, but it was intolerable for Zoom screen shares.
But you need to be scraping the bottom of the barrel to end up with those screens. I doubt you could find something labelled a "monitor" that has that, and, well, if you're putting a $150 40" TV on to your computer... I mean... what did you expect?
(There are also low-end TVs that are still using some crappy LCD techs with bad viewing angles that may make them difficult to use up close, but I wouldn't call that a text rendering problem... those issues just wreck everything. I once had a laptop that when used on a lap, had zero viewing angles; if the vertical middle of the screen was correct, the top and bottom was extremely visibly color shifted. Even the cheapest store brand TVs don't seem to be that bad anymore, though.)
> I believe the discussion about text rendering is referring only to a line of very cheap TVs that do not in fact have RGB pixels.
It also comes up with very expensive OLED monitors, which do usually have true RGB or WRGB pixels, but their subpixels are usually not arranged in the standard horizontal RGB stripe which breaks most implementations of subpixel font rendering. With a sufficiently high pixel density it doesn't matter, but with the ~108ppi of a 27" 1440p OLED monitor the text rendering can be quite visibly worse than a 27" 1440p LCD.
> TVs may have a different subpixel layout than monitors, so small text may suffer fringing. As of writing the Samsung VA and LG IPS panels such as the QN800A have a conventional RGB or BGR subpixel structure. One may also increase the font size or use hidpi scaling which will eliminate all pixel-level concerns.
