Hybrid Work Devices: LG MyView Smart Monitor
LG’s MyView Smart Monitor is truly a hybrid work product – and not just in the sense that it can be used as a work monitor with a corporate laptop, but also that it attempts to be a light computing platform on its own – and a smart TV for entertainment.
This is not a random combination, or simply about space saving, it reflects the reality that work, personal computing, and entertainment share key technical similarities and are often done in a shared space. I spent a few months with the 32” MyView Smart Monitor (32SR85U) to see how well LG has addressed each use case individually, whether a converged product makes sense, and, if so, whether LG’s approach is the right one.
MyView: A 32” 4K computer monitor
The LG MyView is an excellent monitor for productivity and light content creation. The 31.5” 16:19 IPS panel has a claimed 178 degree viewing angle, and although there is definite color shift off-axis, the image is sharp and colors render nicely when connected to Windows or MacOS laptops. Color gamut is specified at DCI-P3 95%; while this isn’t designed for professional color grading, it should be excellent for productivity and content creation. There’s a nice anti-glare coating. In direct comparisons I found that it’s not quite as good as the $200 nano-texture option for the M4 iMac, but it is still effective at reducing glare. The MyView’s listed 1,000:1 contrast ratio appears accurate: black levels don’t approach OLED, but then neither does the price point. The MyView has HDR10, and at 400 nits I was able to see some specular highlights, but HDR is not this monitor’s forte. Gray-to-gray refresh response time is claimed at 5ms, which is fine, but refresh rates top out at 60Hz, so this monitor won’t work for serious gamers.
The stand moves up or down by a few inches and tilts slightly forward and backwards; there is a VESA mount if you need more flexibility. You can connect a PC via HDMI or USB-C; an HDMI cable is included, but not a USB 3.2 Type-C Gen 2 cable, which you’ll need if you want a single connection that also powers a laptop at up to 90 watts. I did not have one on hand, so I tested the monitor over HDMI.
The inclusion of speakers is a bonus for a computer monitor. It lacks bass and fullness for music, but it’s a nice inclusion for things like YouTube instructional videos.
The magnetically attached webcam unfortunately is not accessible by connected PC’s (possibly unless you have that USB 3.2 Type-C Gen 2 cable). In my testing it was only available to the internal webOS apps – more on this below.
$600 is on the high end of the price range for a 32” 4K IPS monitor that only refreshes at 60Hz and lacks NVIDIA and AMD anti-tearing technology for gaming. However, the anti-reflective coating, reasonable brightness, good color reproduction, and internal speakers all add value. If this were just a computer monitor, it would be a bit overpriced, but not unreasonable.
MyView: A 32” 4K Smart TV
The MyView Smart Monitor is a good TV for small spaces. It starts with industrial design and inclusion of a TV remote control. While many desk monitors are intended to be viewed only head-on, LG gave the MyView an attractive white plastic shell even around back that won’t look out of place in a kitchen or family room. (The black-on-white compliance logos on the webcam and the lack of a cover for the ports are the only real misses.) The MyView remote control has quick access buttons for Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+, along with LG Channels. The MyView remote control uses infrared instead of Bluetooth or proprietary RF schemes, but in practice this wasn’t an issue; the emitter appears to be quite powerful and the remote doesn’t need to be pointed directly at the monitor to work. The MyView is also LG Magic Remote Compatible, adding an air pointer and voice control capabilities. Techsponential’s reference TV is an LG C2 OLED with a Magic Remote; it’s fine, but MyView owners won’t be missing enough to justify a separate accessory purchase.
The MyView does not have an OTA HDTV tuner, but LG uses webOS across its smart TV line, so there is solid app support for all the big streaming options. Apple AirPlay 2 and HomeKit compatibility allow casting content from iOS or MacOS devices without an Apple TV. There is also a webOS Divx HD player for playing video files off of USB memory sticks. Still, the internal apps or casting are the best ways to get content to the monitor as there are just two HDMI inputs, and neither supports eARC.
I watched several episodes of Agatha All Along using the embedded Disney+ app and was mostly satisfied. Resolution was good enough to tell when the cast was approaching a forbidding castle; you could see where the road set ended and the green screen CGI started. The MyView’s colors shift significantly when viewed vertically off-axis, and the image gets washed out. Fortunately, this is also a desk monitor, so it is unlikely to matter in the real world: nobody is going to mount this over a fireplace – but you should keep this in mind if you plan to mount it higher or lower than eye level.
Like most modern flat panel televisions, the included speakers cannot reproduce much bass, and the midrange and treble are tinny. A soundbar is highly recommended.
However, considered just as a 32” TV, at $600, it is wildly more expensive than other small 4KTVs (Sony and Samsung have 32” 4KTVs at $500 before sales, and 42” 4KTVs start around $140). Unless you specifically need a 32” 4K set (and not 42”) and value use as a PC monitor, the pricing won’t make sense.
MyView: A lightweight computing platform
The LG Smart Monitor is based on webOS, which began life as a mobile computing platform. It would be great to see the OS that gave us card-based multitasking (and many other) interface standards borrowed by Apple and Google come full circle and serve as a family room or kitchen computing OS. Unfortunately, LG fails badly on this part. This is still mainly a TV/monitor hybrid with the least expensive processor that would run streaming apps. For anything else, it’s painfully slow. It’s great that LG built a user interface that can be customized to individual users, but it's just painfully slow, and that’s just the beginning. The Home Office screen includes Microsoft 365, Microsoft Remote Access, and various Google apps. However, these aren’t native apps – they appear to be running in a proprietary browser. Logging into Microsoft 365 and waiting for my recent documents to load was an exercise in extensive patience I don’t have. Gmail loads and runs a bit faster, but there is no obvious way to adjust the display resolution and font size, so it’s like taking your smartphone display and blowing it up – only without at least making the text sharper. The Smart Monitor supposedly supports Bluetooth for keyboards and mice, but I could not get it to pair with the HyperX Alloy Rise even though it showed up automatically on the Windows PC next to it. I plugged it in via a cable. I used a 2.4 GHz dongle to connect a Matias wireless USB-C Pro mouse, but the webOS TV interface that LG uses isn’t optimized for a keyboard and mouse – there were times when the only way to go back was to pick up the TV remote.
What about personal email or social media? There is no native email app, and only Gmail and Microsoft 365 are shown as icons (they run in the browser). There is an icon for Facebook Messenger (which runs in the browser), but not for Facebook itself, Instagram, or anything else. There isn’t even an icon for launching the web browser on its own. You can launch one of apps invokes the browser, then open a new tab, and enter the URL for Facebook. Parents need to know that there are no filters applied to this browser – I had no problem loading adult content. If it’s any consolation, like everything else, it was too slow to be titillating.
Home Hub for ThinQ takes nine seconds to launch and fully load – even after it has been launched before, and even without any IoT devices listed. This is not a viable way to manage home automation.
Category Analysis and Conclusion
LG asked the right questions when it designed the MyView line. Computing and entertainment have converged with streaming and smart TVs, so why should displays be siloed in “computer monitor” and “TV” buckets? Consumers are working from home, often from laptops, so why not be able to use the smart display for personal computing when that laptop is disconnected?
However, LG’s execution has room for improvement.
The MyView’s webOS-based computing platform is a big, missed opportunity to create a truly unique hybrid work product. LG could buy a faster chipset from MediaTek that would speed up web operation, but webOS simply doesn’t have the productivity apps for this solution to work beyond a browser, and the webOS browser is not well supported by consumer or enterprise web apps. webOS is essentially LG-only at this point, so there is no incentive for developers to support it beyond entertainment apps to access LG’s large smart TV base. That isn’t the case for Android or ChromeOS, and rivals like Samsung, Lenovo, or HP could create a true triple threat product if they combined 144 Hz USB-C monitor with a TV interface, remote control, and an OS designed for checking email, web browsing, and social media. The combination would still require adding cost for a chipset that can run them at 4K with reasonable performance, but Samsung has found with its Frame TVs that consumers are willing to pay a premium for products that solve lifestyle pain points.
Finally, Google could really help if it made Android TV accessible as a mode within Android or launchable within ChromeOS rather than a separate product. To build a MyView competitor today, OEMs would have to manage the complexity of three separate interfaces: a basic inputs and picture quality UI for the monitor itself, a 10 foot TV interface (Tizen, Android TV, Fire TV, or Roku), and an OS for productivity (Android or ChromeOS) when a PC is not connected.
With the MyView Smart Monitor 32SR85U, LG is trying to combine three products in one: a relatively large 4K computer monitor, a relatively small smart TV, and a light computing platform, just add keyboard and mouse. LG succeeds at two out of three: it’s an especially nice productivity monitor, a reasonable TV, and a miserable computing platform. It makes sense for those who value close-to-reference color, the anti-glare coating, and a TV remote; they have to be willing to pay the premium from lesser IPS monitors, but not willing to spend more for a 4K OLED.
LG also sells a similar monitor, the 32SR73U, for $380 that has many of the same features. It lacks the webcam and only supports 65w over USB, has slightly less accurate color reproduction (DCI-P3 90% vs 95%), doesn’t have an anti-glare coating, and it isn’t as bright (250 nits vs 400). The consolation is that the contrast ratio is higher (3000:1 vs 1000:1). While the monitor itself isn’t as nice, as a combination product for roughly the same price as more basic 4K monitors or 4KTVs, that one will makes sense to more buyers.
The fixed 60Hz refresh rate on both MyView monitors hurts LG’s case for converged entertainment with a gaming laptop, PC, or current generation game console. I suspect that if the current MyView line gets an upgrade for 2025, that is where LG will focus improvements, rather than standalone computing.
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