How can I tell whether I have a LG or Samsung screen on my MacBook Pro with Retina display?

Go to your Applications folder and launch Terminal. Paste in the following and hit return:

ioreg -lw0 | grep "EDID" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

Look at the beginning of the second line to see which manufacturer made your display. If it starts with LP then you have an LG display. Samsung displays start with LSN

Mogambo_kush_hua wrote:

Even I get the same thng in my second line

Color LCD. There is no LSN and LP in the second line. What does this mean?

It probably means you have a 13" screen; that terminal command only works with the 15" screen.

No dude, look on the following line below where it says COLOR LCD... Mine returs the following

Color LCD

LSN154########

Which means I have the samsung display. I've hashed out my last few digits for privacy reasons.

It seems the strings location has changed. Type this one instead :

ioreg -lw0 | grep "EDID" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r

I run this on macbook air 13 and here is the result :

?????????x??WT?'"PT?"??P?00 6??LSN133BT01A02?Color LCD

PT?K???qO?@??V^???)P0 5UP!?

You can still see the manufacturer code LSN or LP on the first line right before "?Color LCD".

Thank you for your concern. LSN133BT01A02 is a model number of Samsung 13" LCD panel in Macbook Air 2012. It's not a serial number. You can google this number to get more detail specification of the panel.

Hi all, i am new to a mac. I have the 15 inch retina. I typed the comand into the terminal app -

1.) the result with:

ioreg -lw0 | grep \"EDID\" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

came back with no results

2.) the results with:

ioreg -lw0 | grep "EDID" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r

were as follows :

????????0?!xo??UL?%

PT?@?4p0 6K??Color LCD

I still have no idea what make my screen is. Any help would be much appreciated :-)

I can confirm that using OS X Mavericks (10.9.1), the below command in fact does display the info needed to descern what TFT you have in your notebook: That's what shows up when I run the command, and given the LSN in the beginning, thankfully I have a Samsung TFT!

ioreg -lw0 | grep "EDID" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

Color LCD

LSN154YL01-A01

DLM341503S4FF0QAS

Color LCD

That's what shows up when I run the command, and given the LSN in the beginning, thankfully I have a Samsung TFT!

Hehe. I can confirm that using OS X Mavericks (10.9.2), the below command in fact does not display the info needed to descern what TFT I have in my notebook: That's what shows up when I run the command, so I have no idea which display I have.

ioreg -lw0 | grep "EDID" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r | strings -6

Color LCD

That's what shows up when I run the command, so I have no idea which display I have.

Mine says

Color LCD

LP154WT1-SJE1

DCN417500HHFD4NA6

Color LCD

Ugh, I was hoping for Samsung but got LG. I thought the color, contrast, non-dark "blacks," maybe other things seemed horrible which is why I even wondered and then checked. Very sad same price and no choice.

^So what, LG isn't necessarily bad, depending on how recent your rMBP is & what panel batch it's using, it may in fact have better qualities overall. There's no such thing as SG being better forever, for a period LG had some qualities that made it worse overall, then for a period that switched to SG*. Follow some of the major threads on panel analysis, read through all of them as much as possible, then you'll have a much better perspective. Unsubscribed from this thread now, so apologies in advance for no follow-up responses.

*& for some folks it was the opposite the whole time, because of the things they value most in a display

Hi there,

IMO it does matter. LG screens are crap and you get far more dead pixels occurring (or will occur), than on a Samsung screen. There is a huge, huge difference in quality with these manufacturers with Samsung being far more superior.

I am speaking from experience and can confirm that LG are the worst, the absolute pits. In fact, that's probably why Apple have got rid of them and use Samsung. Steer away from anything LG.

Maz, (Unhappy rMBP owner with a crappy LG screen!)

Jacks-MBP:~ Jack$ ioreg -lw0 |grep "EDID" | sed "/[^<]*</s///" | xxd -p -r

??????.??!xo??UL?%

PT?@?4p0 6K??Color LCD

???????"?5()x?ou?UM?%PT?+???f!V?Q0F?3???2LS

?HP w1858

?CNC9270DMK

!???????

?<"x"??UK?&

PT?iMac

-?p?z1?x????Q?h???????py?n???/??

I am having the same issue as some other people, I ran the command above and got that result, still does not tell me what display make I have. MacBook Pro 15 inch Mid-2015, OS X 10.10.5

Thanks

Hi there, just got a new rMBP with latest OS X. So, yes, it really doesn't work (speaking about shell command given above). So i tried to dig into the problem and was able to find out how to check wether rMBP has LG or Sums screen.

ioreg -l -x | grep IODisplay | xxd -p | grep 4c50| wc -l

If command above will give you an answer "2" - you have LG screen.

ioreg -l -x | grep IODisplay | xxd -p | grep 4c534e | wc -l

If command above would give you "2" - you have Sums screen.

"4c50" - LG in HEX

"4c534e" - LSN

My rMBP just has the same issue - two bright spots.

I didn't get a 2 for either....

Jacks-MacBook-Pro:~ Jack$ ioreg -l -x | grep IODisplay | xxd -p | grep 4c50| wc -l

3

Jacks-MacBook-Pro:~ Jack$ ioreg -l -x | grep IODisplay | xxd -p | grep 4c534e | wc -l

0

Unfortunately I don't believe this new method is successful.

The final part of that command is "wc" which is the word/character/line count function in BSD UNIX. But the command appears to be counting any instance of LG or LSN regardless of its context. For example, where LG (regardless of case?) occurs within another name it is counted. This is why there are zero counts for LSN because it's an extremely unusual letter combination but LG is found a few times in various unrelated object names.

You can confirm this by changing IODisplay to IODisplayEDID in the command and you'll get 0 for both. IODisplayEDID refers to a fairly cumbersome string that should contain the display manufacturer, but possibly in coded form. Someone will have to work on this more to discover how the manufacturer can be extracted or whether it's been completely masked and hidden by the operating system. The Wikipedia page for EDID is over my head so I can't do it. In this case installing an earlier version of OS X (such as to a thumb drive or spare external) may be the only way you can find out definitely.

What's clear is that Apple has indeed taken steps to hide this information from the user. Really though you should focus more on visual aspects of the screen and any flaws rather than stressing about its manufacturer.

I'm interested because my former display had the white dots flaw and so I got it replaced. My new screen is fine so far and looks equivalent in performance but I know they white dots only appeared after a 1-3 months last time so I'm a bit nervous.