Anyone use a curved monitor? Preference curved or flat?
Curves are better than flat beyond a certain size, which for me is about 30" at desktop sitting distance.
The viewing angle of large, flat screens really suffers when you sit close to them, so a curve helps to mitigate that. People who vigorously defend flat screens are the same people who angle screens towards themselves in a polygonal curve when using multiple displays, so they want a curved screen without realising they want a curved screen. I've used 27 and 32" curved, and felt the 27" was unnecessary. I've used 29" ultrawide flat and wanted the curve (though that was IPS so off-angle viewing wasn't good). And I think a 16:9 flat screen can be reasonable if you have it further back on your desk. Using a 42" TV as a monitor, even at the back of a large desk was horrible, reading detail in the edges of that TV were just as disappointing as watching a movie but the only seat is right at the front corner of the theatre.
IMO the distortion is something your brain adapts to within a day or two. Old CRTs were curved and cinema theatre screens are still curved to this day, nobody every complained about that! Realistically the projection mapping of our human FOV isn't perfectly mapped to a flat display anyway, so a flat display is already "wrong" to our eyes, we're just
used to it. You can get used to a slightly different "wrong" in no time at all. I jump between curved and flat displays several times a day and getting used to a curved screen is not something that is mutually exclusive to flat screens. Once you're used to it you're good to go for life.
The caveat with curved displays is that it's harder to get one with uniform backlighting unless you go with OLED. The diffuser sheets in curved displays are never quite at the perfect, uniform distance of higher-quality flat displays, so you just need to avoid ultra-cheap curved monitors as they're likely to have backlight bleed and uniformity issues.
