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Curved TVs Nothing But a Gimmick
Lucas123 (935744) writes "Currently, the hottest trend from TV manufacturers is to offer curved panels, but analysts say it's nothing more than a ploy to pander to consumers who want the latest, coolest-looking tech in their home. In the end, the TVs don't offer better picture quality. In fact, they offer a degraded view to anyone sitting off center. Samsung and LG claim that the curve provides a cinema-like experience by offering a more balanced and uniform view so that the edges of the set don't appear further away than the middle. Paul Gray, director of European TV Research for DisplaySearch, said those claims are nothing by pseudo-science. "Curved screens are a gimmick, much along the same lines as 3D TVs are," said Paul O'Donovan, Gartner's principal analyst for consumer electronics research."
Curved TV's aren't better? I can't believe it!
Samsung and LG claim that the curve provides a cinema-like experience by offering a more balanced and uniform view so that the edges of the set don't appear further away than the middle...
Reality: the curved TVs provide a cinema-like experience by charging roughly four times what a reasonable person would pay.
That way they'd fit into the corner.
Samsung and LG want curved TVs to become all the rage because the only way to currently make them are using OLEDs and they own many of the patents for OLED screens. With that said, the Samsung OLED television got a glowing review from Consumer Reports - basically the only downside to the TV was the cost which is sure to come down in the future.
From convex, to flat, to concave TVs, all in the last 50 years! Progress is a sweet thing, my friends.
You know what? I predict that, by 2050, we will all be using donut-shaped screens, to better utilize our ear-vision for maximum possible immersion.
Per the internets, the curving is done in movie theatres to help avoid the pincushion effect from the projector. Since we are talking about TVs and not projectors, the pincushion effect is irrelevant.
Curved television displays aren't "largely" a gimmick-- they're just a gimmick.
In a movie theater, which uses projection, the curved screen is to alleviate the pincushion effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pincushion_distortion) created by the anamorphic lens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_lens) that the theater uses. This is utterly irrelevant to the image created by a monitor TV.
In short, yes; pure marketing BS.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
A few months ago I started using a 4k panel as my primary monitor. Wonderful, I absolutely love it, with one* slight annoyance - At a distance of 2ish feet (rather than TV-viewing distances of 10+ feet), the edges have enough of an angle that the foreshortening becomes distractingly noticeable.
If we could get a decently priced panel (c'mon, Big Names, Seiki has proven you can do it, quit trying to get $2500 for the same thing they list for $499!) with a slight curve to it, it would significantly improve the experience when used as a monitor. For TV, maybe not so much; but monitors, yes.
* Well, no, the biggest problem comes from the fact that in 2014, Windows still can't sanely handle displays over 96dpi. But I can't blame the display itself for that.
We don't want curved, we don't want 3d.
We want High Dynamic Range (!)
Looking at a TV is still nowhere near looking out of the window.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
TV screens are not being projected on with an anamorphic lens. There is equal spacing between each pixel on a TV. So making a TV screen curved simply ADDS the distortion that curved cinema screens are designed to prevent.
This is the worst part though:
The slight curvature also reduces visual geometric distortion. When you watch a perfectly flat TV screen, Soneira explained, the corners of the screen are farther away than the center so they appear smaller. "As a result, the eye doesn't see the screen as a perfect rectangle - it actually sees dual elongated trapezoids, which is keystone geometric distortion," Soneira wrote.
WHAT? The screen is a rectangle, so our eye sees it as a rectangle, just as it would any other rectangular object! The visual cortex of our brain makes sure of that. How can someone who works with TVs not understand basic concepts of human vision?