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  • tphb - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    It seems like a very clever idea and looks useful for gaming. But what happens when you go back to spreadsheets? Is it going to be a distracting distortion?
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    From video I've seen elsewhere they're really quick to remove/install so taking them off if they get in the way shouldn't be a problem.
  • jjj - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    Don't know what's wrong with them, no serious company should sell something like this. What's next, an edible toilet seat?
  • willis936 - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    I would think a toilet plate is more likely. The marketing departments wouldn't be able to pass up a slogan like "so clean you can eat off of it".
  • jordanclock - Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - link

    Are you a troll or just unimaginative? This is a solution to a problem a lot of people have with multimonitor setups.
  • quiksilvr - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    Or just make monitors that do not have bezels on the left and right? I mean Samsung did it on their phones by doing a cheeky curve; this cant be done on monitors except do a slight curve in the opposite direction?
  • DanNeely - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    It's certainly an interesting demo, but I don't get why they're going to production with a translucent plastic instead of something that's almost completely clear (and has the proper coatings to control unwanted internal reflections) to remove the very visible contrast reduction it where it's installed.

    The only thing I can think of is that if it's also slightly blurry it might help with hiding not having the screens positioned pixel perfect in relation to each other. (If someone gets a review set of these things, that's something I'd really be interested in having looked at.)

    I'm also curious how sensitive it is to bezel thicknesses: Both on the sides for overlap/alignment and top/bottom for getting it to fit right. Basically is this a general solution that will work for any X" display or would a custom set need to be done for each monitor being supported.
  • ShieTar - Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - link

    They probably use plastic because a glass prism of that size would cost a few hundred $ to produce. And a few thousand $ to coat with an wideband antireflection coating.

    In the production of optical components, when you get above a certain size (~2" / 50 mm), production cost starts to increase exponentially with size.
  • MrSpadge - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    I wonder if it would be feasible to counteract the intensity loss by increasing the brightness of the region beneath the prism. Since it's (so far) custom made for specific Asus monitors, the width of that region would be safely known. The only major drawback I see is that the brightness modification seems to depend on the viewing angle, which would be hard to know.
  • Anand_win - Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - link

    We have some very old AOC monitors at work that have this funtion. It increases the brightness level at the top left of the display. I don't know what's the purpose of this function but it's very much possible to implement it.
  • Beaver M. - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    Looks at least as distracting as a bezel. Not to mention that it looks like it blurs the quality and isnt very accurate.
  • stephenbrooks - Tuesday, January 16, 2018 - link

    What I find exciting about this is that there's the possibility of compensating for the unavoidable* distortion on the graphics card (like some VR headsets do), giving a continuous undistorted monitor.

    * I say unavoidable because as it stands, the image has to be stretched to cover the extra bezel area.
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - link

    There doesn't have to be stretching distortion. It's a triangle, the long side is shorter than the 2 shorter sides combined. Sized and spaced correctly the part of actual screens covered by the prism is equal to its front surface while the extra part of the back sides is the bezels that are made to go away.
  • stephenbrooks - Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - link

    That's true, although it does impose quite an angle between the monitors (or a large prism size) unless the bezels are originally very thin.
  • Manch - Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - link

    I have three Dell 1080p monitors and think this has potential. If used with monitors that already have very thin bezels to minimize the distortion me thinks its pretty cool. You don't have to buy it so I don't understand why everyone is pissing and moaning about it. but hey, to hell with cheap solutions or any solutions at all. ASUS should only make super ultrawide 4k+ monitors at a price affordable by everyone that lives off their mommy.
  • Lord of the Bored - Wednesday, January 17, 2018 - link

    Monitors are for chumps. ASUS should only make holodecks and neural interfaces.

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