Q: How can I tell whether I have a LG or Samsung screen on my MacBook Pro with Retina 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!)

when I enter the code into the terminal, it asks me to get X code, but won't install it. What is X code?

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

None of those commands give me a number 2

here is the result

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

       7

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

       0

Content removed pending further investigation!

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.