By Omar Billawala

The list is long and getting longer.  Products that seemed really cool but were destined to be merely footnotes in the history of tech.  The 2014 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas brought us one more–curved TV screens.  These elegant pieces of engineering were touted as must-have products for the family room.  Curved TVs after all provide the advantages of:

• Uniform viewing distance (distance from screen to eyeball varies less than if screen were flat);
• Wider viewing angle (the curve adds slightly to the effective field of view);
• More of a 3D feel (after all, the TV is no longer flat); and
• Better sense of immersion (on our way to having a TV surround us on all sides!).

With such compelling advantages how could curved TV screens flop?

The answer is, “very easily.”

We like aesthetics.  LCD, Plasma, and LED TVs have rapidly supplanted cathode-ray-tube-based TVs.  They are lower power, lighter, provide better contrast and higher resolution and never need to have their electron guns “aligned.”  All of these advantages pale in comparison to the true reason for the rapid tubal exodus–their elegance and their slender profile.  If you doubt this is the case, just imagine if we were to reverse the specs–we would still be buying the thin TVs we can hang on walls in droves.

With HD and now UHD TVs have become highly commoditized.  Even cheap TVs have astonishingly great specs.  Manufacturers are desperately trying to find differentiating features to drive the sales of their TVs.  The most recent feature “failure” was 3D and, though it may resurface in the future some day, 3D has done very little to drive the sales of TVs.  Manufacturers are building set-top box features into their TVs, they are turning them into native game machines, and they are trying to make them thinner and thinner, but they are running out of ideas.  Knowing that we are creatures of aesthetics they searched for and found what they would have you believe is the “next great thing”–the curved flat-panel TV.  OLED technology is used on a flexible plastic substrate instead of glass to create a curved screen.

And, if the curved TV functioned as well as a flat-panel TV, manufacturers may have hit a winner.  Unfortunately, for all but the person in the focal point (dead center) of the viewing area, curved TVs enhance angular image distortion.  The curved TVs no longer fit flush onto a wall, and they are dramatically more expensive.  If a salesperson tries to sell you one, run, don’t walk, away and to your nearest Costco and pick up a much less expensive and more functional flat-panel TV. 

Yes, curved TVs are the 2014 CES flop.  Maybe we will see the technology succeed in the personal computer space–after all, they did look very cool in Avatar–but, for now, they are a just a technology con, designed to extract dollars from your pocket while providing you all the benefits of snake oil.  

Please don’t confuse “flopping” with “fail so completely that there will not be any tiny niche market for them.”  Just as there as some manufacturers still making cassette tape players, into the foreseeable future, traditional TVs with curved screens will survive, they just won’t be the dominant or event a major feature in the home.