EYES ON THE PRIZE
Josh Collins tests a selection of curved PC monitors to find which ones have the right kind of flex and which can, well, just get bent.
The labs team expert tests of a wide selection of six curved PC monitors.
Curved monitors are nothing new, but they’re still littleunderstood by many PC pros and enthusiasts. Take a closer look at the specs, for example, and you’ll begin to see the range of variation available on the market.
For many people, when they think about a curved monitor, they typically imagine an ultra-wide 21:9 aspect ratio display. This tends to hold true even for those who identify as PC enthusiasts and pride themselves on knowledge of products available in the market. If that rings true for you — news flash! Curved displays are available in 16:9 aspect ratio too, and we’ve got some to share with you.
Aspect ratio isn’t the only variable, though: curved displays also come in a variety of curvatures. The bow of the panel and surrounding bezel is listed by a four-digit figure followed by an ‘R’. The R is shorthand for ‘radius’ and the four-digit figure is the dimension of the radius of the curve in millimetres (mm). For example, 1800R refers to a display curvature that has a 1.80m radius.
THANKS TO MWAVE AND OFFICEWORKS
We reached out to a range of vendors for this roundup, but for a variety of reasons, many of the models we had hoped to include in this roundup were either entirely unavailable for review, unable to arrive in time to meet our deadlines or out with other reviewers. Such is life with media sample pools, however, we’re fortunate to have some helpful retail contacts at Mwave ( www.mwave.com.au) and OfficeWorks ( www.officeworks.com.au) who stepped up to help supply some additional test samples.
Though we directly invited a huge range of vendors to submit review units for this round-up (including Acer, BenQ, Samsung, ViewSonic, Dell and others), scheduling and availability conflicts prevented many from participating. That said, this isn’t the only time we’ll be looking at curved displays this year — we’ll be back with another round-up later in 2017 and, with a bit of luck, more of the usual suspects should be able to supply samples for that feature.