Last year, accessory company Alogic launched its 27-inch “Clarity” display, offering a 4K experience with 90 watts of power delivery to charge a connected computer, an array of connectivity options and hub functionality to connect peripheral devices.
The Clarity Display offers a solid set of features, including an IPS display for wide viewing angles, 97% coverage of DCI-P3 colors, HDR 400 support and the ability to quickly switch between landscape and portrait orientations, but Alogic’s newly launched Clarity Pro and Clarity With the Pro Touch models now eyeing some additional features
I’ve been testing the two new models for a few weeks, and I find the clever new features they include to be interesting additions that give buyers some nice options to consider depending on their needs.
All three models use the same basic display and design, and I found them bright with vivid colors for a high-quality viewing experience, thanks to the quantum dot (QD) backlighting that offers good contrast and supports it above. billion colors
I’ve been using a pair of LG Ultrafine 5K displays for several years now, and I’ve been pleased to find that I haven’t really noticed any difference in the day-to-day experience when running these 4K displays at scale. The 2560 x 1440 resolution matches the desktop size of my previous 27-inch 5K displays, although the Alogic displays aren’t running on proper retina scaling in this scene.
What the Clarity Pro adds beyond the standard Clarity Display is an integrated webcam, which has a nifty privacy-related feature to turn it off when not in use. Automatically moves itself behind the display, ensuring that the camera cannot be accessed surreptitiously by malware. or other attacks without your knowledge. If the camera is up, it’s active, and if it’s down, it can’t see anything but inside the display housing even if video capture is enabled without your knowledge.
The camera makes some noise as it moves up and down, which reminds me of the potential for such motorized parts to break over time, but I appreciate the automatic privacy aspect. I also like the small adjustment wheel that allows the camera’s field of view to be moved up or down to better frame it. It doesn’t offer as much flexibility as a standalone webcam accessory, but it’s better than a fixed camera integrated into a display bezel, for example.
The 8-megapixel webcam offers solid video quality compared to other options built into Apple’s notebooks or external displays, though the Continuity Camera feature recently added to macOS and iOS means you can do better using your iPhone as your Mac’s webcam.
I ran into a camera bug with Zoom when trying to use a pair of these displays, as the app would only recognize one webcam regardless of the identically named Logic Display camera I selected in the video settings. Alogic says this is a known issue without a resolution yet, but I haven’t had the same problem with other apps I’ve tested, including Skype, FaceTime, and Teams, so it appears to be something specific to Zoom.
Stepping up to Clarity Pro Touch adds one additional key feature over Clarity Pro and that is touchscreen support. Although macOS doesn’t offer as much support for touch functionality as Windows, some drivers and a configuration app from Logic help provide a decent amount of functionality in macOS. With touchscreen support, you can use your finger or capacitive stylus (Apple Pencil not supported) to interact with onscreen content.
With the UPDD Commander app, you can customize a fairly substantial list of one-, two-, three-, or five-finger touch gestures by tapping, swiping, and dragging across different areas of the screen. For example, a one-finger tap can register as a traditional mouse click, while a two-finger tap can register as a right click, and you can even customize which of the two fingers should be considered the tap position.
A swipe from the bottom of the screen can be configured to show/hide the Dock, while other combinations of fingers and gestures can do things like launch Mission Control, hide or exit apps, minimize windows, and more. Two-finger rotating and pinching motions can also be recognized, allowing basic direct manipulation of images for rotation and zoom.
Beyond a series of default gestures, you can configure gestures on a per-app basis, with many Mac apps like Finder, Maps, and Preview automatically pre-configured after installing Alogic’s drivers and apps. But you are free to further customize any of these and add additional apps to the list as you see fit. It took me a bit of fiddling to get everything set up, but once it was done I found the touch functionality to work well and feel quite natural.
While I still prefer using a mouse for most things, I found the touchscreen functionality on the Clarity Pro Touch to be of some use. I’ve settled on a setup with it in portrait orientation to my left with email, Twitter, and Slack, and to set up like the status screen and tap on emails or my It’s easier to be able to scroll feeds by touch instead of moving my mouse from another screen.
The three displays feature a high-quality design with a cable management passthrough on the vertical support along with a solid two-piece aluminum stand with height, swivel and tilt adjustment. The stand has really nice heft and keeps the display very stable as I type on the same support surface.
If you prefer other mounting solutions, the displays also support 100×100 VESA attachments, and Alogic sells an optional Clarity Fold Stand that puts the display in a more ergonomic configuration. This is especially true for Clarity Pro Touch when used for drawing, for example, although limited Mac support for this functionality makes the setup less attractive for users of the Apple ecosystem.
An assortment of cables in the box with 1-meter USB-C to USB-C (3.2 Gen 1), 1.5-meter USB-A to USB-B, 1.5-meter DisplayPort to DisplayPort, and 1.5-meter HDMI to HDMI options for almost any setup. should work with
The displays are on the glossy side, but I didn’t find a lot of glare in my setup. The black bezels measure about 1cm around the top and sides and about 2cm around the bottom. They’re not the slimmest bezels on the market and the thick bottom bezel looks a little out of place, but I’ve certainly seen worse and at least the display and bezels are flat under a continuous sheet of glass, except for the very thin edges.
Both the Clarity Pro and Clarity Pro Touch include a four-microphone array for the webcam, and audio quality was solid in my tests. The onboard dual 5-watt speakers are less impressive, sounding quite hollow compared to the speakers on my MacBook Pro or even my normal LG Ultrafine Display.
Speaker volume and display brightness on the Alogic’s display also don’t respond natively to the Mac’s media keys despite being connected via USB-C. I’ve tried a few third-party apps that try to add this functionality, but they’ve only had partial success.
I know I’ve been spoiled by my LG displays that had the benefit of Apple’s input allowing those functions to work pretty seamlessly, but the resignation to audio handling on Logic’s displays was still a bit of a letdown for me. Volume and brightness can still be managed via button controls at the bottom edge of the display, but there’s nothing integrating everything with macOS for adjustments from my menu bar or keyboard.
One downgrade for the Clarity Pro and Clarity Pro Touch compared to the original Clarity Display is that USB-C passthrough charging is limited to 65 watts instead of 90 watts. Because it adds a built-in webcam, it saves 25 watts of power to run.
I wish Alogic had opted for a higher-wattage brick in these Pro models to save 90-watt computer charging rather than using a 150-watt brick, but considering the efficiency of Apple’s recent notebooks, 65W will probably be enough to keep up. A 16-inch ‘MacBook Pro’ is tops unless you’re doing particularly demanding tasks. That’s certainly enough for me, but if you can’t find it, you can easily connect another charging source like the MagSafe Power Adapter.
The Algic Display includes some USB hub functionality, although it’s important to note that it’s quite limited as it only has two USB-A ports on the back of the display and a 3.5mm jack for audio. If your display is connected via USB-C, those USB-A ports will run at USB 2.0 speeds, which is fine for a wired keyboard or mouse, but probably too slow for most users’ needs if they’re trying to connect external storage. .
If you connect the USB-B port on the display to your computer, those USB-A ports can run at USB 3.0 speeds, which are significantly better but still much slower than other connection options. Regardless of the connection, these are still USB-A ports in an era where peripherals are increasingly using USB-C
For example, connecting a modest USB-C SSD external drive via USB-A yields a transfer rate of just 38 MB/s, about 20x faster than connecting directly to my computer via USB-C. slow But for low-bandwidth connection needs, it will work just fine.
The original Clarity Display is regularly priced at $799.99, while the new Clarity Pro with webcam functionality comes in at $999.99 and the Clarity Pro Touch is another $200 upgrade at $1,199.99. That’s on the fairly pricey side for 27-inch 4K 60Hz displays, though they come with a pretty robust set of features.
Alogic is currently running a 20% off promotion with code ALG20 That brings the prices down to $640.00, $799.20 and $959.20 respectively, so this is a great opportunity to pick up the new displays if they appeal to you.
Note: Alogic provided MacRumors with the Clarity Pro and Clarity Pro Touch Display for the purpose of this review. No other compensation was received. MacRumors is an authorized partner with Alogic. When you click on a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps keep our site running.
