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I don't like curved displays
- ggm 1y agoFor the investment of one image, maybe a second image might have made your point. I don't like curved displays either, but I observe many widescreen photos offer a distorted view of the scene taken on a large flat monitor, since the lens is a compromise as is printing on flat media, and so the image as presented from a wide-angle is NOT accurate, any more than a curved screen of a 55mm lens would be. The problem here is horses-for-courses: if you have a wide curved screen then you should ask your digital devices to render images as if they are being displayed on a curved surface, not as if they are flat. Anamorphic lenses should be projected/presented on curved surfaces and packages like Hugin will render images which should look pretty good on a curved surface of a known radius, assembled from sets of non-curved flat images put together in a panorama. Or apps like Bimostitch on android, which looks to use the same algorithms. I don't like curved screens because I haven't learned to rotate my head the way needed to deal with content on the edge. I like dual monitors in a V more than a single wide-screen because they can be independently desktop-panned, only some widescreens do this (by s/w rendering it as two heads) For some work (Audacity - audio editing, and related video work) a wide screen is fantastic. Horses for courses.
- hnuser123456 1y agoThis got me thinking, are there any games that have a graphics setting for monitor curvature? Because they should, IIRC the standard is rectilinear rendering, where the perspective comes out correct only if the monitor is flat. But if people can get used to glasses that severely distort the image, I guess this isn't a big deal. Also, my obligatory rant, ultrawide monitors do not exist, only ultrashort, and 16:10 shouldn't have become a "premium/business/designer/prosumer" option, it should just be the standard. Nobody gets a VR headset and crops off the bottom and top thirds of the image and claims it's more immersive that way.
- beanjuiceII 1y agoi never thought i'd like a curved display until i got one..now i want to move all my monitors to curved...i guess to each their own!
- JohnFen 1y agoI had no opinion until I was assigned one at work. My opinion is the opposite of yours. I find it very annoying (for reasons entirely unrelated to what the article is talking about), and wish that I could swap it out. I may smuggle my own monitor in to do that. Different strokes for different folks!
- tbomb 1y agoFor me, I've found that some curved displays are better than others. My home monitor is curved, on a seemingly very large radius, and I love it! However some that I've used that are more curved make everything look distorted.
- Insanity 1y agoI've been thinking of getting one. What is your use-case and why do you like it? Mine would be mostly work, but at least some gaming each week.
- ge96 1y agoMy regret is I didn't buy a 4K one at 32" but it's still good Some of my buddies have that 8K Samsung one, that one is nuts to see in person
- bityard 1y agoI think LCDs have been around long enough that we no longer notice all the problems with them. If you have a large monitor on your desk, chances are very good that there is nowhere you can place your head where some part of the display doesn't look noticeably darker than another part. You can TRY to compensate for that by cranking the brightness up, but then you set yourself up for eye strain. I'm lead to believe that OLED displays don't have these issues (and have much better color fidelity as well) but they have a limited lifespan.
- foobarian 1y agoI use a nice 32" 4k IPS panel for work and it's borderline OK in the corners. However I got a really wide curved screen for a second computer and in that case I really appreciate the shape just because it mitigates the distortion somewhat.
- matsemann 1y agoI don't mind curved screens, but what I do mind is that so many wide / curved screens have such low vertical resolution. 1440px is just so little space.
- jsheard 1y agoIt's a cost thing, ultrawide has always been expensive relative to how much extra area you get, and pushing the resolution up compounds that. 5120x2160 (extended 4K) panels do exist but they cost a fortune.
- skhameneh 1y agoAnd not in OLED, only in VA panels, unfortunately. I can't justify going high end on a monitor without it being OLED.
- jsheard 1y agoLG has a 5120x2160 OLED already, but it's 45" so the pixel density isn't great. It's also stupid expensive, about double the cost of a regular 4K OLED for 30% more width. They have 39" and 34" variants on their roadmap though.
- skhameneh 1y agoTrue, that is an option I forgot about. I generally don't see it any better than a standard 16:9 OLED given the price and limited (in comparison to 32:9) width though. > the pixel density isn't great. I got one of the 49" 32:9 OLED and it has 1140 vertical. I'm making due with it and had to tweak settings like crazy to make it tolerable... I'd love a proper 2160 option for the ratio. I came from a 28" 4K TN panel, so it's been a major change of tradeoffs. It's hard to justify the higher price on the smaller 45", it makes it a hard sell over a standard 16:9 ratio 4K OLED (although I wonder if that would have been the better choice over what I got).
- bpye 1y agoIPS ultrawides also exist, the U4025QW I have is one.
- drcode 1y agoI don't like straight displays, things at the corners are a different size than things in the middle, because they are further from my head. On curved displays, objects on different areas of the screen are the same size as they originally appeared.
- bill876 1y ago> On curved displays, objects on different areas of the screen are the same size This is only true if your eyes are in the focus point (center of the circle) and you never move your head or chair.
- crooked-v 1y agoThat's why you gotta get yourself one of these, obviously: https://www.ergoquest.com/zero-gravity-workstation-0a.html https://www.ergoquest.com/zero-gravity-workstation-0a.html
- hu3 1y agoOr this: https://imperatorworks.com/index.php/gm-520 https://imperatorworks.com/index.php/gm-520
- jovial_cavalier 1y agoIt's much closer to true on a curved screen than a flat screen.
- Joker_vD 1y agoYeah, projecting onto a plane instead of a... spherical dome? means that things at the border of your screen are more visible than the things at its middle which definitely not how eyes usually work. It's especially glaring when the far plane serves as the place where the view-distance limiting fog is rendered: if there is some thing barely visible before you, turn 45% to the side, and you'll see that thing very clearly at the side of your view.
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- eviks 1y ago> so viewing the image on a flat screen looks exactly the same as how it originally appeared. What about all the other things you view on your screen?
- sippeangelo 1y agoI like my curved ultra-wide. I didn't at first, but my brain has very noticeably adapted to where curved things on it appear straight just fine. I noticed this when I went back to the office after a few weeks absence, where I have a regular flat pancake screen in 16:9, and straight text looked CURVED in the opposite direction! Brains are weird.
- DamnInteresting 1y agoI have a curved monitor on my regular desk, and a flat panel on my treadmill desk. Switching between the two takes a few minutes of adjustment for things to look right. I had a similar peculiarity with eyeglasses. I'd always had great vision, but middle age recently hit me like a truck, and my eyes have started to go. I got a prescription, and there was a difference between the two eyes. For the first few days, everything looked misshapen, larger on one side than the other, until my brain compensated. Most curious.
- hakunin 1y agoI got a curved 5k2k lg display for games, and every time I switch to work monitor (5k regular flat lg), it feels like I'm looking at an old CRT that's bulging out at me. Such a strange sensation. I do like the curved display a lot however.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI use a 49” LG ultrawide (5120 X 1440). It’s curved, and I have no issues at all with it. I thought I would, at first, but it’s been fine. But it’s also only curved horizontally. Not sure how it would be, if it were square.
- sigma02 1y agoAs someone who wears corrective lenses for astigmatism, I can guarantee that what you perceive as a straight line, assuming you are human, is not, until your brain corrects it and signals 'straight line' to you. It takes a day or so for your brain to get used to any consistent distortion and totally disregard it. This is just pointless complaining... A bigger complaint with curved screens is: crazy reflections.
- okr 1y agoDid it ever happen to you, that you are not dealing with humans and therefore you noted this assumption?
- layer8 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you're_a_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_... Though I suspect their visual system works the same way.
- cout 1y agoI had this experience back when the glass on CRTs was curved and monitors started shipping with knobs to adjust the curvature of the image. I had used a curved-glass CRT (curved the opposite way of today's curved monitors) for so long that nothing looked quite right after that until LCDs came into the picture (pun intended).
- reaperducer 1y agoAs someone who wears corrective lenses for astigmatism, I can guarantee that what you perceive as a straight line, assuming you are human, is not, until your brain corrects it and signals 'straight line' to you. That is unrelated to astigmatism. In Art 101 class in college we explored this phenomenon. It's caused by the spherical nature of the human eyeball. The exercise was to sit on the floor in the corner of a particular campus building that had a lot of long architectural lines and draw what you see without looking at the paper. If you drew straight lines, the prof knew you were thinking about drawing, and not just drawing what you saw.
- gtech1 1y ago"straight lines are no longer straight" Minkowski space-time enters the chat
- pfedak 1y agoThis is nonsense, at least in part because it's mixing two different ideas. The notion that the image "looks exactly the same as how it originally appeared" is only true when one of your eyes is positioned exactly where the camera sensor would have been, which requires a specific distance away from the screen. Lines in 3D remaining straight in a photo is unrelated and not actually demonstrated by the image. I'm having trouble imagining why this matters - you're trying to find the intersection of two lines in an image without drawing anything?
- seper8 1y agoI have a 2x 4k ultrawide. The Samsung Oddysey 55(?)inch variant. Not only is it very bright and legible, the fact that the screen takes up my field of view helps me focus. And I connect it to my MacBook using two seperate HDMI cables, so it's essentially two seperate monitors without bezels. I think I'll probably keep this monitor for a decade or so: any higher DPI and it doesn't make any difference because you have to size up the text. Any brighter and my eyes will burn out of their sockets.
- zamadatix 1y agoThe top end Samsung Odyssey monitors definitely near impossible to beat with any other choice for folks that prefer curved displays. For folks that like flat, something like the PG32UQX is probably one of the better equivalents since the flat Odyssey monitors always assume "I want the highest end version" = "I want the curved version". For those who don't care about maximum brightness quite as much, the new OLEDs are getting quite good for both curved and flat (though the lifespan issue isn't quite as fully solved as the manufacturers would like to have you believe, it's significantly better). > any higher DPI and it doesn't make any difference because you have to size up the text. I get irked (to perhaps irrational levels) when a monitor's DPI (really PPI) is phrased in terms of how big text appears. Text is already sized in physically based units (even when CSS lies and says "px" it's really fractions of an inch, similar to pt), DPI is how sharp/clear the text ends up looking for the given font size. A monitor with twice the DPI should give you clearer text, not smaller text.
- helsinki 1y agoHow do you use two of these massive monitors? They are stacked vertically?
- seper8 1y agoSorry, I should have been more clear: the resolution is equal to two 4k monitors glued together.
- nancyminusone 1y agoI don't like them either, because they reflect and focus sound back at you.
- boboboboboboo 1y ago[dead]
- theodric 1y agoI think curves make sense for e.g. those 34-40" 21:9 and 49" 32:9 displays, because otherwise the edges are much further from your peripheral vision, requiring you to change focus significantly to look at different parts of the screen. My mother has a 22" 16:9 curved screen, and it's impossible to sit at a distance for which the curve is useful while still preserving your ability to actually focus on the fucking thing.
- dsr_ 1y agoDifferent people have different preferences. I suspect a bunch of smaller manufacturers would have more success with their products if there was an easy way to try them out for a week or two. Buying hardware sight-unseen incurs a heavy risk penalty. Buying it after seeing it in a store for ten minutes is some reduction, but not a lot. How many people would spend $250 on a split ergo ortho keyboard having never touched anything other than a laptop or maybe a mushy $12 pack-in included with their Dell at work? What's the appropriate solution other than inflating the price even more to cover a generous return policy? I might buy a Keyboard.io or a Moonlander... but there's a pretty high risk I won't love it. These things can be subtle: I quite like the X-Bows Knight I'm typing on now, and can't stand the Keychron Q10 which, by all rights, I ought to find about as comfortable.
- comprev 1y agoOver the years I've gifted a few nice keyboards to people and their immediate response has often been "why didn't I get a proper mechanical keyboard sooner!" They had only used cheap plastic or laptop keyboards until then and never saw a keyboard as a tool to invest in for their profession (which often required plenty of typing).
- LorenDB 1y ago> a mushy $12 pack-in included with their Dell at work For what they are, the standard Dell keyboards are quite nice.
- formerly_proven 1y agoPepperidge Farm remembers when Fujitsu computers (those assembled in germany into the 2010s) used to come with rebadged steel-plate Cherry keyboards. Okay, they had mushy browns I think, but still. You go unpack the bundled keyboard and it weighs a kilo. They were still rubberdomes (G83 I think?), just really nice ones.
- lisper 1y agoOnce upon a time there were these places called “retail stores” where you could go look at actual products and even try them out before buying them. Alas.
- curvedstan 1y agoCurved displays are great if you are near a window or any other light source that causes glare. I switched from flat to curved and there’s no more glare on my display.
- ubermonkey 1y agoI don't get 'em either. What I really don't like are superwide monitors. They play hell with usability in screen-sharing contexts.
- ziml77 1y agoThat was a concern when I had an ultrawide monitor. Fortunately I remote into work and the screen share happens on that remote side. So whenever I had to screen share, I would take Citrix Viewer out of full screen and size the window to my best estimate of 16:9. I don't think anyone ever knew that I was using an ultrawide monitor, though I do wonder if they ever noticed that the aspect ratio of my desktop shifted a bit between each sharing session.
- _zoltan_ 1y agoI used to not like them until I've switched to the 57", 1000R Samsung. I love it.
- ziml77 1y agoI have a 32 inch flat display and I actually do think it would have been better with a bit of a curve. It would help keep the distance of all points of the screen from me more consistent. If I sat another couple feet back from the display, then I think the flat screen would make more sense because the relative difference in distance would be smaller.
- back2dafucha 1y agoLittle curve good, big curve bad. Imagine its 20 years ago before these monitors were made and you had multiple monitors. Ever see a dashboard chihuahua? (Or on the rear deck of a car). Thats you if you use a multimonitor setup. Do that for even 10 years, your neck hurts and your focus is distracted because you cant look straight ahead at your work and are constantly turning your head from left to right all day. Its a bad ergo. Little curve good. Big curve only for gaming immersion. I refuse to use dual monitors even if a 27 inch panel is provided.
- Joker_vD 1y agoIs turning you head left and right really worse for the neck than rigidly keeping staring straight for hours? Somehow I find it hard to believe.
- Dilettante_ 1y agoYeah, "turning your head is an unnatural movement" is a wild take. Setting aside the matter of ancestral environment, there are plenty of professions where people work at a desk/workstation on which they have to look at different "zones" while working.
- back2dafucha 1y agoJCPenney security guard?
- Dilettante_ 1y agoSpecific examples I had in mind were Kaizen-Style assembly workers and craftspeople who work on things fine/small enough to fit most of their workflow on a (large) desk.
- back2dafucha 1y agoI ----------------------------------------------------- Dunno
- layer8 1y agoThe eye adjusts to it. Since getting used to a curved monitor, flat monitors now look convex-curved like an old CRT to me when sitting in front of them.
- ziml77 1y agoYes! The edges of my large, flat monitor feel like they are curved outwards. It's certainly not a huge deal, but next time I get a monitor this large I'll be going with curved to counteract that effect.
- paleogizmo 1y agoWas there actually more to this posting and it got cut off? I'm not seeing why this is a practical issue. I'm partial to large displays with a more traditional aspect ratio, but using ultrawides, including curved ones occasionally isn't annoying to me. What really grinds my gears is that one coworker who doggedly insists on sharing his full desktop every single damned time which makes text nearly unreadable on anything other than another ultrawide.
- Havoc 1y agoDepends on size. With a 49" it absolutely helps because it reduced how much you need to change the distance your eyes are focusing at between center and sides.
- beloch 1y agoWould the author of this post have enjoyed or hated seeing a movie in Cinerama? Anyone who has been seated too close to a flat IMAX screen knows that even a flat screen can give a severely distorted viewing experience if you're not in a good viewing position (e.g. if you're seated off-axis and close). In recent years, curved panels have been a way to compensate for issues created by limited viewing angles offered by LCD screens. If a screen is sufficiently large and the seating position close enough, one could often see a pattern on the screen even when viewing a single solid colour. The choice of screen geometry was a choice between different forms of image distortion. As technology improves and viewing angles become wider and more consistent, we'll probably see curved panels become more niche again.
- cwmoore 1y agoI have a view of a brick wall, that has a setback, so the left part of the wall is closer than the part to the right. From a certain distance, the setback has six vertical courses aligning with the mortar and on the closer face of the wall every five courses. I wonder how perceptive our visual areas might be with respect to pixels when I see the shattered shadows of LED panel parking lot lights (32 individual point sources) or the strobe at night of headlights. Still, I would like a curved display. Maybe a Las Vegas Eyeball.
- Jedd 1y agoTFA doesn't mention the size of their monitor, or the ratio of it, or the distance they typically sit from their monitor, or the horizontal placement (relative to their eyeballs), or the type of work they're doing. I'd also expect a mention of the amount of curve they are upset about. There's a few varieties, the 1500R and the 1800R were the most common two when I was shopping last year, in the AU domestic market. Those numbers refer to how the monitor might fit on an imagined circle's radius (measured in millimetres, naturally). So an 1800R is a gentler curve than a 1500R. I find UW's beyond about 34" are mostly more comfortable in an 1800R for 'office work' activities (not including CAD, photo / image manipulation, etc) and gaming. (I actually have a 43" flat, in 16:9, it sits about a metre from my eyeballs, and I usually aim for my eyes to be about 1/3 the way from the top of the screen. After several months with this, I now feel a gentle curve on this would be a bit more ergonomic.)
- bpye 1y agoI have the Dell U4025QW which has a 2500R curve and I do think it’s beneficial. If I had dual 27” monitors instead I would also have a slight angle between them - so the curve seems like a natural progression.
- maxlin 1y agoThis is only true if the monitor is the size of the CMOS/CCD sensor. Which it pretty much never is. Not the highest effort blog post. I'm actually a bit curious why it's on the front page though. Accidental engagement bait? :D
- ardit33 1y agoNah... I do like them. I like having an ultrawide monitor, and curved is a must .
- ehnto 1y agoCurved for games makes a lot of sense because it can emulate the 3D camera's Field of View making it more naturally display a wrap around world. I also do a lot of VR stuff and those lenses are a whole different kind distortion. You get used to it super fast. You can really mess with the perception of visual reality in VR, and the brain is very good at just accepting the new reality and adjusting.
- zkmon 1y agoThis is so true. Glad someone posted about it. But ofcourse, the buyers won't care. They are easily sold with the idea that the far edges of the screen have low angle of view if the screen isn't curved. When people believe myths, sell them myths. When they believe the purpose of computers and phone is to share photos and videos, sell them fb and ig. Also, for companies buying the curved monitors, the looks of the monitors across the workplace fit nicely into their "modernization" targets. No physics needed.
- antonvs 1y agoI’ve recently been using (in different locations) a flat 27” 4K, a flat 32” 4K, and an old (2018) 34” curved 3440x1440. I find the flat 32” too large to use at normal desktop distances, because the corners are in a bad position/distance/angle to actually read easily. This isn’t a “myth”, it’s what I experience. For me, the curved 34” doesn’t have this problem. The only problem I find with it is its resolution is too low for its size (i.e. low DPI). As a result I actually like the flat 27” best, but I suspect a larger curved monitor with higher DPI would be nice.
- DiabloD3 1y agoI don't get the use case of curved displays. I game, games do not support spherical "fisheye" rendering, thus the entire product concept is effectively dead, as no software supports correcting for these, since high end monitors are only typically sold for gaming, rarely office productivity.
- numpad0 1y agodistances between viewpoint and arbitrary points the panel is not constant. To some people, this variation becomes painful enough with ultrawide displays...
- DiabloD3 1y agoI can almost see this complaint with poorly designed (ie, common and cheap) polarizers in LCDs and/or non-IPS/IPS-like LCDs at normal DPI. However, that doesn't really work with OLEDs or MicroLEDs at any DPI, or any HighDPI IPS/IPS-likes. Also, ultrawides are pretty rare. Multiple monitors have a lot more use, are a lot cheaper per pixel, and back to gaming again, a lot of games simply do not support anything but their native aspect ratio and will blackbox the viewport to prevent bugs and cheaters.
- numpad0 1y agoIt's not the matter of viewing angles. Distances. Try calculating distances between eyes to the edges of especially ultrawides, for which curved displays are pretty common. Standard recommended distances between head to display is 50cm(20").
- DiabloD3 1y agoOptimal viewing distance for most media (including text found in programs and websites made in the "Vista" and "Retina OSX" era to today, but also all movies and TV shows cut for modern 16:9 displays) is between 30 (SMPTE rec.) and 40 (THX rec.) degrees. THX's recommendation is based purely on the viewing angle of the fovae (the inner part of the retina that is "high res"), and trying to optimize full coverage of it (ie, pixels on the screen should not fall outside of the fovae). Microsoft, during Vista, and Apple, during the evolution of OSX, both standardized font sizes as a little larger to make all text sizes comfortable at the 30 to 40 degree range. 30 degrees is * 1.6 diagonal size, 40 degrees is * 1.2 diagonal size. So, if you have a standard 24" 1080p monitor, that is 28.8 to 38.4 inches, not 20. SMPTE and THX did not change recommendations for 4k, as the view angle of visual media (ie, the focal length in movies/TV shows) did not change, and text doubles in (pixel) size (but not apparent size) to accommodate it; ergo, do math as if you're on a 100% DPI display. Ergo, 24" 4k would be the same. Also, for completeness sake, 27" 1440p are rare, but a bit more common with gamers, and their math works out to be between 32.4 and 43.2 inches. This is assuming you adjusted your DPI to 133% and/or you're purely focused on movies/TV and games; if you consume only text and stay at 100% and never view media, you may wish 24.3 to 32.4 inches instead.
- akch 1y agoYou are serving Menlo font on your website (monospace). This is not an open font. It is Apple IP and is not licensed for being served over the internet. Although it is a derivative of the FOSS fonts-- Bitstream Vera and DejaVu, Menlo itself is not released with an open license. It's only meant for use with Apple devices. I'd suggest changing to one of the many high quality FOSS fonts available online.
- esperent 1y agoAre you an Apple IP lawyer? If not, why are you doing their work for for them?
- nottorp 1y agoHmm i suppose it's how you use your multi monitor setup too. I don't have both displays in front of me, I have one mostly in front and one to the left side, which i keep angled more than what a curved display will give me. Main work in front, reference on left. I suppose I'd keep a curved ultrawide the same way. Not that I'm thinking of trying one, I like the physical separation that two different monitors provide.
- davemp 1y agoI had a curved ultrawide for a while, and didn’t have many complaints. But I switched to a 32” 16:9 and 24” 16:9 portrait and wouldn’t go back. I’ve found having extra vertical space to be really nice and that window managers are easier to organize with separate monitors. I think it takes up less desk space as well.
- conradludgate 1y agoSince I'm not actually looking at images, instead I'm looking at text, I love my 4k 32" 16:9 curved display. I typically have 2 vertical windows open on it, so since I do more work on the edge rather than the center, the curve does help me see my work just a bit clearer than otherwise. It's subtle, but it feels weird when I look at a flat display now
- timeinput 1y agoMy ideal coding configuration is 3-4x vertical 32" UHD screens (with the smallest bezels you can get) in a 'curved' formation. I find that configuration miserable for any hobby activities. I really like a horizontal screen, and curved is nice, but one screen even the ultra wides just isn't enough for work. Maybe I could imagine a pair of ultra wides in an over/under configuration, but I really like vertical real estate.
- effnorwood 1y ago[dead]