So check your external display’s brightness level by pressing Control + F2 on your keyboard. This can happen with external displays too. Silly me, I just forgot to turn the brightness back up. I thought my MacBook Pro’s display was borked when I disconnected the cable because the display stayed black. One time while watching a movie in my living room, I used my MacBook Pro as a video source to my HDTV, and I turned the brightness all the way down on my MacBook Pro to direct all attention to the TV. Is your brightness turned all the way down?

You can go to the Apple tech specs page, select your Mac, and see the displays it supports. The general rule of thumb is that most modern Macs manufactured after 2013 will support such a high resolution (but not all of them). After you’ve first turned the external display on (because no one ever forgets to do that), here are some things you can check: Is the display supported?įor many 4K and 5K displays, you need to be using a Mac with a graphics card powerful enough to push that many pixels. It can also mean that there is a power issue, that the brightness is too low, or something else.

Whenever your external display shows a black or other solid color, it typically means there’s a problem with the signal to the display, but not always. No picture – screen is black or another color With a gist of some of the things that could have gone wrong, do any of these sound familiar to you? If so, follow along as we talk about some potential fixes to these issues.

Inaccuracies and issues with color occur.

Blurry or wrongly-scaled picture is shown.

If it wasn’t you that tapped the button, and it happened while you weren’t even home because one of your kids was toying around, or someone else who used the computer changed the settings, then this makes it even more challenging to figure out what’s going on.Īmong some of the things that can go wrong with an external display are: 5) Mac’s external display issues fixed What could possibly go wrong with Mac’s external display?Įxternal displays, whether you bought one of Apple’s rather pricey options or you went with a third-party brand like LG, Samsung, or Dell, are subject to potential issues.Īlthough Apple does its best to make things plug-and-play, other manufacturers tend to have very different standards, and this means you may have to troubleshoot issues or take extra steps to configure a display to work properly with your Mac.Įven if your display isn’t new, you may have nudged a configuration button by mistake, which could cause all kinds of issues with its performance.

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