Samsung Monster Gaming Monitor

http://hothardware.com/news/samsung-49-inch-mega-wide-curved-display

These will no doubt cost well in excess of a thousand dollars when they first come on the market and are their newest QLED monitors with at least a thousand nits of brightness and 100% of the color spectrum. QLED can theoretically go up to 3,000 nits and be so bright and accurately render colors that you would swear you were looking through a window, but don't have quite the high contrast of OLEDs which produce deeper blacks. Its really a race at this point between OLEDs and QLEDs, but QLEDs have all the potential to become the next cheap display to replace conventional LCDs and OLEDs to provide a more expensive alternative. Recently someone figured out how to possibly give OLEDs similar brightness to QLEDs and it could be another ten years or more before both technologies really start to fully mature, but both are already here to stay. Currently QLED looks more likely to become cheaper faster, while OLEDs are so expensive they are usually used in cellphones instead of big displays, but all of that could easily change in the very near future.

Today 27" monitors are common among gamers and are considered quite large enough to inspire great "immersion". However, ideally speaking, what you want is something more like an 80" framed poster you buy at Wall Mart for a few hundred bucks and hang on the wall. Making it that large allows the monitor to provide peripheral vision and this mere 49.9" monitor compensates for reduced peripheral vision by curving the screen. Its serious overkill in all but a die hard gamer, but even at a few thousand bucks it means video gaming is still a reasonably inexpensive hobby and one where the prices of these things is normally cut in half every three years or so. Within about five or six years these giant monitors should come down in price to within five hundred bucks or less making them a much more attractive alternative for a lot of people. Both TVs and monitors are converging on what I call the "Timex Watch Effect" where they become so cheap and ubiquitous and can do so much more than the average person could ever want it becomes the last thing most people think about when they buy one. Sometime in the next twenty years I figure, at which point, every monitor and TV could be holographic for all I know.

Physicists have already figured out the basics of how to make cheap and vibrant holographic monitors that resemble a high resolution version of the famous video game scene in Star Wars where holographic figures jump out from the screen and stand about several inches tall, however, recent advances in lasers also make it possible to produce projectors that don't get hot and produce outrageous ultra high definition pictures of any size you want. Its even theoretically possible to create a monitor that uses electric fields to shape a liquid crystal and have the monsters literally reach out and grab you. Fun stuff that could take a few years for the laser projectors and a decade or two for the holograms, while the Terminator robots that can change shape and form at will using magnetic fields and LCDs might take a bit longer.