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.
Though I suspect their visual system works the same way.
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.
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.)
Brains are weird.
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 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).
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.
This is something I always wanted here in Australia; hopefully we get enough push for it one day given our otherwise good consumer protection laws.
For what they are, the standard Dell keyboards are quite nice.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
