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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."
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.
But curved TV's give the appearance of a TV that will produce a better picture. That's something, right?
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?