Alogic Clarity 5K Touch 27-inch monitor review: our favorite touchscreen just got 5K

Best Prices Today: Alogic Clarity 5K Touch 27in Touchscreen Monitor

Our favorite touchscreen display for Mac has for a while been Alogic’s Clarity 4K Pro Touch. The company has now released a 5K version with a few other minor tweaks, and we love this one too.

You can use the touchscreen display much like an iPad with on-screen tap, swipe, slide and pinch. Alogic is calling it “the world’s first 5K touchscreen for Macs”. Apple certainly prefers 5K over 4K, as seen in its choice of Retina 5K displays on many of its computer screens, but, despite its iPhone and iPad expertise, it hasn’t yet given us a touchscreen Mac.

Clarity is actually a range of great-looking premium monitors that can pivot from landscape to portrait orientations and boast a back-mounted USB-C hub, plus one of the best adjustable stands we have tested. Read our full Alogic Clarity Monitor review and Alogic Clarity Pro Touch Monitor review.

5K benefits over 4K

Aside from a higher price point—$1,599 vs $1,399—what are the differences between a 4K monitor and 5K display?

The simplest explanation is, of course, to look at the monitor’s resolution: 4K is called 4K because it has roughly 4,000 pixels wide (3840 x 2160 pixels), while 5K is around 5,000 pixels wide (5120 x 2880). This offers both more screen real-estate and a higher pixel density.

The 5K’s 5120-x-2880 resolution can bring 33% more visual space (see above) than a 4K monitor (below), with 78% more pixels (14,745,600 vs 8,294,400).

That said, a more reasonable and eye-friendly resolution would be 2560 x 1440.

What’s important—especially to graphics and video professionals—is the greater pixel density, where more pixels are packed into the same screen area: 5K’s 218 vs 4K’s 163 pixels per inch (PPI).

A higher pixel density means that images appear sharper on a 5K display. It’s not immediately obvious but working up close, you can see the difference in quality of the finer details—just like you can when comparing 4K to HD (1920 x 1080, 108 PPI). That means you can work more precisely with a greater level of detail. My testing setup was the new 5K Touch and the 4K Touch and the difference is visible to the trained eye, although many casual users might not spot the improvement.

Screen pixels and colors

• Color Coverage (DCI-P3): 99%
• Color Coverage (Adobe RGB): 99%
• Color Coverage (sRGB): 100%

The key consideration when buying a display is the picture quality, and the Clarity 5K Touch is a clear winner with its enhanced resolution, vibrant colors and sharp details.

It offers 99% Adobe RGB Color Accuracy, which will impress creative pros at this display size. It should mean better color accuracy in color-managed environments that can properly utilize the AdobeRGB color space, where the colors appear richer and more accurate. However, this accuracy isn’t particularly important for non creative professionals.

Apple’s own 5K display, the Studio Display, goes brighter (600 nits vs 400) but Alogic’s display supports HDR (High Dynamic Range) 600 content, which means that the whites of the display are very bright and clear, and the blacks much deeper, giving the same effect as 600 nits.

The Clarity uses QLED (Quantum Dot LED) screen technology that helps produce brighter and more vibrant colors than usual.

The screen finish is high gloss, which helps reduce finger prints but does suffer from reflections, so screen positioning will be important, and the highly adjustable stand is your friend in this regard.

As we noted with the 4K Touch, while the Studio Display offers a higher-end screen, the Alogic Clarity screen will be bright and impressive enough for most users—and of course offers the all-important touchscreen controls.

The One Glass Solution (OGS) technology combines the monitor’s protective layer with its input layer via a conductive medium remarkably keeps the Clarity Touch’s screen as thin as the other Clarity monitors, while maintaining the monitor’s bright picture. Lower-cost, capacitive touchscreen monitors often appear darker because of the extra layer of glass required by a touchscreen.

Design and looks

The Clarity displays measure 56.5cm tall (22.2in), 62.4cm (24.5in) wide and 22cm (8.7in) deep. The aluminum Clarity’s minimalist and metallic looks are very Mac friendly.

Unlike with the static Apple display, you can easily adjust the height of the Clarity monitors. The excellent stand is height-adjustable up to 150mm. In addition to this, the screen can tilt and swivel and rotate in portrait and landscape orientations.

The stand’s base and stem snap together easily, and supports 100x100mm VESA mounts—handily it includes compatible mounting screws.

With the 4K Touch, a gravity sensor detected the rotation and adjusted the picture to match the orientation. This is no longer the case with the 5K Touch, so you’ll need to twist your head when making the necessary settings on the Mac when rotating the screen to Portrait mode.

Touchscreen controls

Comparing the Clarity Touch and Apple Studio Display on specs is not the whole story as what will attract buyers is the Clarity’s precision, 10-point multitouch, One Glass Solution touchscreen, absent from the Studio Display.

There aren’t many large touchscreen displays for Mac, and Alogic claims this is the first 5K touchscreen for Mac.

We are used to touchscreens with our phones and tablets but using one with a Mac brings real benefits, especially for professionals such as creatives and scientists.

Popular creative programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, SketchUp, ZBrush, Autodesk Maya, Blender and Inkscape, for example, allow for touch-based freehand input, such as drawing or sculpting. It’s a more intuitive way to fine-tune levels and effects in photo-editing or music mixing, in applications such as Adobe Lightroom and Audition, and Apple Pro Logic.

Alogic offers an optional pro-level accessory, the $219 Clarity Fold Stand, to better facilitate comfortable and more precise drawing or interacting onscreen. The articulating stand acts like a drafting board, securely holding the monitor raised at an angle. It can rotate 360° so that you can easily share work with colleagues.

Non-creatives can join in the fun, too, moving folders around, opening tabs, and double- and triple-tapping text with a finger. You are unlikely to entirely give up your desktop mouse, but using a touchscreen is a liberating experience, and you might find yourself pinching and swiping your standard screen after some time with the Clarity Touch.

You can use your fingers or any capacitive stylus to interact with the onscreen content. The Clarity 5K Touch is compatible with any MPP 2.0 styluses, such as the $109.99/£69.99 Clarity Active Stylus Pen 2, which boasts 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, tilt sensitivity, a configurable quick-action button, and USB-C charging. MPP 2.0 is a standardized stylus input protocol developed by Microsoft. Apple limitations mean that the pen’s built in digital eraser doesn’t work with Macs, unfortunately.

Using the stylus you should achieve smoother handwriting and sketching. The stylus detects the angle it’s being held at, which is useful for shading and precision drawing. You can even rest your palm on the screen without interfering with the pen input.

If you fancy two Clarity 5K Touch screens, you are out of luck as a Mac user, unless you are using two different computers. While Windows will support two touchscreen monitors out of the box (in Extended mode), the Mac is having none of it. That’s not to say you can’t line up the 5K Touch with an $899 Clarity 27-inch Monitor for a dual-screen setup that looks fantastic.

Touchscreen Mac setup

Setting up the touchscreen requires some software installing, System Settings setting, and fiddly configuration software clicking. While Alogic includes a link to the Base-Touch UPDD Mac touch drivers (via QR code in the manual and a link on the product page), and that comes with some online instructions, it’s not as simple as you might expect. Clearer step-by-step instructions would be an easy improvement from Alogic.

To be fair, Alogic’s tech support is excellent, and some of my missteps were fixed with a reboot or by unplugging the display for a minute or so and then reconnecting.

No webcam

The Clarity Pro monitors added a 8-megapixel webcam that automatically raised itself from the top of the monitor when it sensed a need for it via apps such as FaceTime, Zoom, Google Meet, Slack or Teams. On paper this looks like a neat solution, but we weren’t sold on its flimsy adjustability or picture quality.

Alogic would prefer you to buy its more extensively featured Illuminate USB-C Light Bar with 4K Autofocus Webcam, for an extra $190 / £119.

This 12-megapixel webcam sits in the middle of a 19-inch LED light bar. Picture quality is excellent with rapid focus, and you can adjust brightness and color temperature adjustment via a cool-looking wireless remote control puck. A magnetic cover fits over the webcam lens when you want some privacy.

You’ll save money but lose the useful light bar by choosing one of our recommended best Mac webcams instead.

Either way, as it is a separate gadget, you’ll need to sacrifice another of your computer’s USB-C ports for connect a webcam as the monitor itself has just the one USB-C port in its hub, and you need that to connect to your Mac to get the touchscreen functionality. Instead, you could choose to connect the webcam to one of the monitor’s USB-A ports, although you’ll need to invest in a USB-C to USB-A adapter cable.

Competent yet uninspiring speakers

Alogic’s Clarity display features two 5W speakers. These are fine for video calls but you wouldn’t want to listen to music on it as they lack bass—although they are a nicer sound than the tinny speakers on the M2 Mac mini we tested the monitor with. The built-in 3.5mm audio jack can be used to connect external speakers that will perform much better. Of course, you could use a decent wireless speaker setup, too.

Built-in multi-port hub and power

The back-mounted hub includes a USB-C upstream port that supports DisplayPort 1.4, plus an upstream USB-B port, and two USB-A downstream ports, as well as a DisplayPort 1.4 and two HDMI 2.1 ports, and a 3.5mm audio port.

You connect from your Mac to the screen via either the USB-C, USB-B, DisplayPort 1.4 or one of the HDMI 2.1 ports. But connecting via the video ports will not allow the touchscreen to work, so you can forget these. You paid extra for the touchscreen, so you are going to want to use it!

Using USB-C or USB-B, it can connect to your computer for not just the display but also charge a laptop at up to 65W at the same time. 65W is a little light for the 16-inch MacBook Pro but should keep your connected laptop topped up enough to keep working and is fine for lower-end MacBooks. Powering your MacBook from the monitor will free up that USB-C port you might be using for the webcam, although all of Apple’s latest laptops feature a separate MagSafe 3 power port.

While the Clarity Touch’s port hub looks impressive on paper, much of it is superfluous. To use the touchscreen to its full potential you’ll really need to use the one USB-C slot. (You could use the USB-B port but the USB-B to USB-A cable is not much use with a modern Mac. As you can’t daisy-chain extra monitors from the Clarity, the three dedicated video ports aren’t doing anything. Indeed, the monitor’s two HDMI 2.0 ports don’t have enough bandwidth to deliver smooth 60Hz video.

If the computer is connected to the USB-C port on the display, the USB-A ports will operate at a plodding USB 2.0 (480MBps) speed because the video traffic shares the USB-C cable with the USB data. They are fine for a keyboard and mouse if you aren’t a wireless input user, as most of us are these days. The Clarity monitors come with three cables: USB-C to USB-C (5Gbps), HDMI-to-HDMI, DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort and, curiously, USB-A to USB-B.

The USB-C connection is the most important, the dedicated video ports don’t make much sense with a touchscreen, the USB-B port is an oddity and the USB-A ports are low powered. Where the hub does come in useful if you connect a webcam, which you can connect to the monitor via USB-A as suggested above.

Price

The Alogic Clarity 5K Touch 27-inch monitor is priced at $1,599, $200 more than the 4K Touch model (which features a webcam). In the U.K. it costs £1,299. While it’s certainly not a budget 5K display, it is reasonably priced for a large high-resolution touchscreen.

Without a touchscreen and at 4K resolution, Alogic sells the 27-inch Clarity for $899, or $1,099 with webcam.

Artists might prefer the pressure-sensitive delights of the Wacom Cintiq Pro, but that 27-inch model costs more than twice as much at $3,499 / £3,250.

Compared to another quality 5K Mac display, the 5K Touch is $400 cheaper than the equivalent (with properly adjustable stand) non-touch 5K Apple Studio Display. That Apple monitor is better is some ways, but in terms of touch, there is no 5K comparison.

Read our full roundup of the best monitors for Mac.

Should you buy Alogic Clarity 5K Touch?

The Alogic Clarity 5K Touch is a welcome super pixel-density enhancement to the limited Mac touchscreen market. Artists and video pros will appreciate the higher resolution of this premium 27-inch touchscreen display with a fantastic height-adjustable, tilt and pivot stand, and impressive color specs.

Best Prices Today: Alogic Clarity 5K Touch 27in Touchscreen Monitor