The Fox Report
Barry Fox’s technology column
Choosing your monitor – curved or flat?
R
emember the curved screen
craze of the early 2010s? On a
whim and prayer Korean companies Samsung and LG decided that
TV screens should wrap around the
viewer. Other companies felt they
had to follow.
Turan Erdogan, CEO of Vestel, the
Turkish electronics giant that manufactures just about anything for numerous
household name brands (and no relation to Turkish President Recep Erdogan) said at the time: ‘I have spent my
life trying to make TV screens perfectly
flat, and now I have to curve them.’
Predictably, curvy TV fell by the
wayside. The screens weren’t big
enough, like cinema screens, to wrap
round the viewer. Curving wasn’t good
for family viewing, either. It was 3D
all over again.
But now there is a new, real use for
curved screens – as computer monitors.
Largely because curving TV screens
got a bad name, curving monitors is
not being heavily promoted. But I’ll
argue, after trying one, that a curved
computer monitor is a good and useful
thing – especially as more people are
working from home in a cramped space.
I tried a Philips 241E monitor, with
1920×1080 resolution and specified
visible diagonal screen size of 59.9 cm
(23.6-inch). The screen curve is only
a modest 3cm or so deep, but this is
enough to reduce the desk footprint to
The curved Philips 241E computer monitor 59.9 cm (23.6”) 1920 x 1080 pixels Full HD.
a measured width of around 53.5 cm
(21-inch). So, the slight curve saves
several inches of footprint space.
The space reduction is not dramatic,
which is why the curve does not noticeably affect the shape of displayed
content. But it can make the difference
between safely squeezing a reasonably
wide monitor on a small desk, and
having it spill unstably over the sides.
I doubt this is what Samsung and
LG had in mind when they tried to
foist curved TVs on us, but it’s a
happy spin-off.
Plastic enclosures:
standard & miniature
More than 5000 different enclosure styles:
hammfg.com/electronics/small-case
01256 812812
sales<at>hammond-electronics.co.uk
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Practical Electronics | November | 2020
