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.
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.
Though I suspect their visual system works the same way.
Brains are weird.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Alas.
How long does it take to decide whether you love or hate a thumb-ball? A big ball? A SpaceMouse? Has anyone who didn't use a ThinkPad decide to buy a keyboard with an integrated nubbin?
Sure, I can buy twenty devices for $200 each and return 19 of them. That puts 19 items into "open box" status, causes me to re-pack and re-ship and track 19 items, and makes 19 vendors vaguely cranky at me.
In the end the problem was actually moving the hand away from the keyboard, so no tilted mouse, thumb mouse or track pad worked. A RollerMouse saved me. I even game with it now, heh.
Just lucky my company paid for all of it (and the ones I didn't use they got back by me distributing to others within the company with issues)
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).
It was absolutely worth it and I would do it again. I love that the keys aren’t staggered like on a typical keyboard — which I find rather silly — but instead are perfectly aligned in straight columns. And the thumb keys. And the configurable chords (yes, chords, that's nerdcore). And much more.
After more practice, and after swapping out the key caps, I now think this is possibly the last keyboard I’ll ever buy. I’m having a hard time imagining anything better (though I could use maybe 1 extra thumb key on each side).
I know a bunch of people who do this for cloth shopping (which isn't a great idea considering everything else except themselves, obviously), where they don't know exactly what size will fit them, so they buy the same dress in 2-3 sizes, try them out at home then return the ones that didn't fit.
1. While many places have no questions asked return policies, many also have more stringent return conditions, such as not allowing exchange for dissatisfaction. For tech retailers, where the margins are low and the goods value is high, I often find they're worse than with clothes, for instance.
2. I did some cursory searching and it doesn't look like even EU guarantees the right to return for satisfaction reasons. The closest is the 14 day right of withdraw for distance purchases, but that can be waived and doesn't cover in-store purchases.
3. Even when returns are theoretically allowed, there are many ways for retailers to make it a hassle, such as not covering return shipping, which for a monitor could be a sizeable amount of money.
The type of return you're talking about is usually intended to encourage people to make a purchase and to protect the reputation of a business. Yet the moment they detect abuse, abuse being return patterns that are atypical or that will end up costing the business more money in the long run, you can be sure they will stop honouring their return policy.
For what they are, the standard Dell keyboards are quite nice.
Today, many years later, monitors are still way worse and more expensive! Also you can basically not buy the tv’s anymore either.
The panel factories existed, and the panels were cheap, years ago. They’re just not used anymore (or so it seems).
Worth every penny.
If my macbook (any macbook, perhaps any computer?) is plugged into the U4025QW and the power goes out, the U4025QW won't get the signal from the laptop and will remain blank. There's two ways to 'fix' this:
The first is to unplug the monitor for a long time, perhaps 2 to 4 hours. Sometimes I'll plug it back in at hour 2 and it wasn't long enough and I'll have to start over.
The second, and this works reliably, is to unplug the U4025QW, and then also unplug the monitor side of the HDMI cable, and then plug it back in with no signal, and then reinsert the HDMI cable. This gets the U4025QW to receive the signal after as long as the above operation takes, a minute or so.
I have had two U4025QW units. The first one was overheating and losing the signal as above on its own. I stopped having overheating issues when I stopped using an undersized UPS. I ran it straight into the wall.
But if there's a power outage (i live in an area with monthly power outages), the signal loss operation is how I restore functionality to the U4025QW.
I finally got one of those 300 dollar UPS units for the U4025QW and it's been very stable since then.
A multi variable episode that took me a very long time to reduce. U4025QW is a great monitor but dont give it bad power and it needs a little love after a power blip.
A question if you don’t mind - Do you find 4K resolution to be sufficient on a 40” screen?
Also just eager to hear any others reasons why you like it
I can't justify going high end on a monitor without it being OLED.
I currently have three 4k 32" screens in portrait arranged in a sort of curved configuration. I love it, except for the bezels. It's something like this: https://i.sstatic.net/YocaE.jpg
I was almost ready to purchase a flat 8k 55" TV for my workstation, but decided to try a flat 4k 55" TV I already had, and the flatness just ruined it for me. I need a slight curve when using such a large surface area only a few feet from my eyes. I guess I'll have to stick with my three 4k monitors for now.
I did not check the physical geometry so the side screens are taller than the center but whatever. 43" flat center, 32" either side. Felt strongly like a mistake when first set up but has grown on me.
Of course, they are not ideal for the graphical work that the author implies, but they can't be beat for productivity work imho.
This is a misunderstanding of what higher resolution is for. Higher resolution allows text at exactly the same size to be much sharper and crisper. I have a 34” curved 1440p, and it’s like using a monitor from the pre-HD era in terms of sharpness. Other people in this thread have observed the same thing. The idea that it’s “perfect” is unfathomable to me.
Have you missed the last decade of High DPI displays and scaling?
1440px tall on a common 13 tall ultrawide is 107 PPI.
In my mind > 100 PPI is pretty much perfect for most tasks. Or are you talking about physical size?
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.
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.
Are you sitting really close or have a really enormous monitor? Measuring how I'm sitting right now, my nose is exactly 61cm from the center-center of my monitor, and ~72cm between my nose and any of the corners, and it's a 32" monitor.
I'm usually sensitive to things not being 100% straight/level/aligned, and if I create five identically sized windows and put them in the middle and one in each corner, I see no difference between them.
Flat ultrawides are an especially miserable experience, where the sides of the monitor are viewed at a 60 degree angle, a pronounced deviation from the 90 degree angle in the middle.
This is only true if your eyes are in the focus point (center of the circle) and you never move your head or chair.
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.
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.
Different strokes for different folks!
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.
However some that I've used that are more curved make everything look distorted.
Some of my buddies have that 8K Samsung one, that one is nuts to see in person
Not the highest effort blog post. I'm actually a bit curious why it's on the front page though. Accidental engagement bait? :D
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.
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.
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.
What about all the other things you view on your screen?
Also, for companies buying the curved monitors, the looks of the monitors across the workplace fit nicely into their "modernization" targets. No physics needed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's subtle, but it feels weird when I look at a flat display now
What I really don't like are superwide monitors. They play hell with usability in screen-sharing contexts.
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.
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.
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.
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").
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?
Minkowski space-time enters the chat
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.
