Your Next Monitor Will Be A Curved 4K: You'll Like It

CES 2015: 11 Peeks Into The Future

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At the just-concluded CES 2015, many eyes were on some of the glorious televisions on display. With sizes that approach measurement in acres, curves that surround you in vibrant colors, and resolutions involving numbers that threaten to match the national debt, these home-theater wonders leave viewers dazzled and amazed. They also offer a glimpse of the enterprise desktop of the near future.

A number of companies were showing off curved, 4K-resolution desktop computer monitors. The 4K part isn't particularly new: Dell, HP, Viewsonic, and even Monoprice have been offering 4K monitors, usually in the 27" class, for some time. Beloved by photographers, videographers, and other "artsy" types, these monitors allow editing full-frame video while software controls or other software are displayed next to the editing suite.

The new parts are the curve and the idea that these could be mainstream enterprise desktop tools. For the first of these you can blame the monitor manufacturers and their "we build it because we can" mode of product design. For the second, feel free to lay the responsibility directly in the laps of SAP, Oracle, and Hadoop.

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It's one thing to have mountains of data for analysts and applications to paw through. It's quite another to be able to understand the information that comes from the analysis. Data visualization is the name of the game, and an outstanding monitor that presents information in bright, beautiful color is the field on which that game will be played in the enterprise.

Visualizing big data in ways that are useful requires the sort of screen that was, until recently, the concern of gamers and streaming-video addicts. The fact that the monitors can, in some cases, represent a cost saving is icing on the cake for IT purchasing managers, but several factors must still be taken into consideration.

The first is obvious: Not every computer graphics board supports 4K (or UHD in the language of some vendors) monitors. Further, it's not a given that you can attach a 4K monitor to a standard HD port and be happy with the results. A particular 4K monitor can actually look worse than an HD monitor with a given graphics card. If you're thinking about buying curved 4K monitors and letting your systems "grow into them" at the next refresh cycle, you'll need to sandbox the results before you go into wide deployment.

The next factor is one where cost savings might come into play. In some applications, curved 4K monitors could replace twin-monitor deployments on certain desktops. Some of this is sheer size: I haven't seen any vendors presenting the curved 4K monitors in less than the 27" class. Some of it, though, is due to the number of pixels on the monitor. With four times the number of pixels available on HD monitors, applications and users can simply put more on the screen.

It's easy to go online and find pundits talking about how silly the notion of curved monitors is, especially for the enterprise. At our current early-market stage, it's not hard to poke fun at the mere idea of these "consumer gadgets" on corporate desktops. When I look at the monitors, though, and remember the technology I've seen at SAP and big data conferences, I'm convinced that these rather lovely pieces of display art are the future of the business display. Have you ordered yours yet?

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