Why Curved Televisions Vanished From Living Rooms While Dominating Desktop Gaming

By 2020, Samsung—the final major manufacturer holding onto curved television production—officially abandoned the design, ending a push that throughout the 2010s marketed concave screens as a more engaging alternative to standard flat displays. The designs offered a striking aesthetic, particularly when replacing bulky early-generation LCD sets, echoing the industry’s earlier push for 3D displays.

Apart from experimental prototypes unlikely to ever hit store shelves, curved TVs are effectively dead. Instead, the dream of that technology lives on in gaming monitors, which offer more extreme curved angles than we’ve ever seen on televisions.

So what went wrong with curved TVs? There’s an obvious short answer, and a few more complicated reasons.

The notion of gaining immersion with large curved screens isn’t anything new. We’ve seen it for decades in IMAX theaters and other large format screens, like the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. It’s easy to feel drawn into The Odyssey when you’re sitting very close to a concave 65-foot tall screen. But there’s a big difference between those massive theaters and a 55- to 65-inch flat panel in your living room, which is likely six to ten feet away from your couch.

Unless you were lucky enough to have a 78-inch curved set and sat fairly close, it was simply hard to replicate the sense of immersion from theaters. And even those large TVs, which were very rare, were still surrounded by everything else in your living room. You can’t exactly get lost in The Lord of the Rings if your TV is surrounded by decorations, family photos and pets eager for your attention.

Even if you were completely satisfied by your curved set, there’s a good chance your friends and family weren’t. Curved LCDs had a sweet spot directly in the middle of their viewing angle, but once you drifted away from that, you instantly lost contrast and color saturation. If you were to watch Game of Thrones’ infamously dark night scenes while sitting off-center from a curved TV, you’d likely have a hard time making out anything happening. (Curved OLED TVs didn’t have the same sweet spot problem, but they were also typically more expensive than standard OLEDs.)

This color and contrast degradation stems from the structural physics of Liquid Crystal Displays. LCD panels rely on a backlighting layer passed through liquid crystals, which shift light orientation; curving an LCD panel physically compresses the glass and substrate layers, altering the uniform alignment of the subpixels. This structural pressure exacerbates light bleed and narrow viewing angles on curved LCDs, whereas self-emissive OLED pixels generate light individually, retaining color consistency regardless of panel bend.

I noticed this myself while watching countless CES TV demos – some curved TVs practically looked greyscale when you were sitting at extreme angles. It was genuinely painful to see what those awful angles did to vibrant and colorful films like the majestic Life of Pi.

According to Dipin Sehdev, founder and CEO of the consumer electronics aggregator CE Critic, it wasn’t just viewers taking issue with curved TVs. “I remember hearing from manufacturers that they were a pain to manufacture at scale,” he said in an interview. “It’s one thing to do a 30- or 32-inch TV, but when you start to get to 55, 65, or even 75-inch curved TVs, they were very difficult to manufacture and ship and keep the uniformity as best as they can.”

Even enormous companies like Samsung can only justify manufacturing losses for so long. When taken together with the other issues around curved TVs, it’s easy to see why TV makers were quick to give up on them.

As flatscreen TVs became slimmer and lighter, consumers were also eager to start mounting them on walls, above fireplaces and wherever they could to save a bit of floor space. But curved TVs also made that difficult, according to Sehdev. “Having a curved TV where the corners stick out, almost up to 6 inches with some of these manufacturers, that was pretty significant when you’re thinking about putting it above a mantle or and trying to have a clean or contemporary look,” he said.

It’s no wonder why curved gaming monitors took off. Since they’re usually meant for a single viewer, their central viewing sweet-spot was a feature, not a bug. We also sit much closer to our monitors, so a 27-inch or 32-inch curved gaming screen can feel genuinely more immersive than a 65-inch TV that you’re sitting far away from.

Curved gaming screens also serve a very functional purpose: They put more of the screen within your direct view, so you don’t have to crane your neck to see the far edges of the screen. That’s particularly useful for online shooters, where you could easily die if you spent an extra half-second noticing someone flanking you from the side. That’s one of many reasons it’s a bad idea to use a standard 32-inch or 40-inch TV as a monitor.

Without curved screens, we likely wouldn’t have extreme ultrawide monitors either. Just imagine how tough it would be to use something like Alienware’s 34-inch ultrawide or Samsung’s 55-inch Odyssey Ark behemoth if they were completely flat screens.

“As soon as we get to ultrawides… obviously the more curved it is, the better it’s going to be,” Sehdev added. “You’re now starting to see some folks that are getting very heavy into simulation gaming with things like Gran Turismo or Flight Simulator from Microsoft. That’s where people want curved screens for those types of gaming experiences.”

Ultimately, 16 years of reporting on the technology sector demonstrates that manufacturers—even leading global hardware corporations—frequently release novel products before identifying their ideal use case. While curved televisions originated primarily as a promotional effort during an industry push to drive display sales, the manufacturing capabilities developed during that period ultimately enabled display makers to build specialized gaming monitors that align directly with consumer demand.