View from the Labs
The past two decades have seen steady improvements in panel size and screen quality, but it’s time to ask for more from our monitors
As anyone who follows me on Twitter will know, I have two main loves: tennis and technology. I missed most of the US Open championship due to being surrounded by monitors and crying at the volume of testing that still needed to be done, but even in the depths of my despair it became clear that this was a breakthrough tournament. Probably the most dramatic one for two decades.
On the men’s side, we had the first clear sign that Novak Djokovic – arguably the greatest male tennis player in history – was no longer at the crest of his career hill but slightly over it. But the women’s tournament was even more dramapacked. If you’re British, then it’s illegal for you not to know that 18-year-old Emma Raducanu crushed her way through ten matches – three of them qualifiers – to become US Open champion, beating another teenager in that final, nerve-jangling match.
In case you’re turning to the front of this magazine to double-check it’s
PC Pro and not Tennis Pro, I’ll get to my point: for the past two decades, as the likes of Serena Williams,
Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal and Djokovic have been crushing all before them, the monitor has sailed serenely on. Sure, we’ve added a USB-C input here, a webcam there, and they’ve stepped up in both size and quality, but fundamentally we’ve been sold the same story since the turn of the century.
This time, in this month’s Labs, there are signs of change. The monitor has been one of the last hold-outs to the pinch-and-zoom revolution, and it’s taken a freshfaced newcomer to break the rules of what a monitor is and give us something different. I’m talking here about the Huawei MateView, a 28in screen with an unconventional 3:2 aspect ratio and a touch-sensitive bar that you intuitively swipe and tap to make it do your bidding. My children were very impressed.
I’m not suggesting that next year’s Labs will see a pile of
MateView lookalikes, but I’m willing to bet a whole fiver that this is the shape of things to come. By the time Djokovic has hung up his racquet in, let’s say, three years’ time, clumsy onscreen displays with Escher-esque submenus will be a thing of the past. The dam has burst, giving manufacturers licence to think different.
The MateView hints at the possible changes of direction. A shift to a more user-centric approach, where we can switch to a Movie mode that genuinely makes a difference to what we see, and tunes the speakers to match. Perhaps, just maybe, they will become intelligent enough to suggest I might want to watch the vital tennis match that’s playing rather than leaving me to sit there, testing my 29th screen for brightness uniformity.
Such intelligence is surely many years away, but the monitor evolution that has taken us from
15in LCD panels to 34in curved widescreens in the space of two decades has gone as far as it can.
Vive la révolution.
“It’s taken a fresh-faced newcomer to break the rules of what a monitor is and give us something different”