This is what happens when you run your mouth on the internet. I thought I was a
cool guy. I was like, "Hey, this is a crazy curved ultrawide Alienware
monitor. If anyone has one of these, I'll pay 10 grand for it so I can unbox
it." I was 100% certain nobody had one.
Alienware told me nobody had one. Well,
as it turns out, Alienware was just
rebranding a monitor from a littleknown company
called Aendo called the CRVD43.
This, my friends, is the world's first,
as far as we can tell, curved desktop monitor and the world's first ultrawide
desktop monitor. and it wasn't Alienware. So, I did get a bit of a
discount, but I still ended up paying $6,000
for this thing. So, it better be reallying
cool. Welcome to Holy,
the heaviest monitor that I have yet encountered.
The genesis of all of this was a Reddit post that was brought up in our weekly
writers meeting. It just it looks so cool. I was like, "Holy crap, that is
such an amazing piece of computing history. Like, I need it." We reached
out to everyone we could think of to get our hands on one of these puppies, but
all of them were dead ends. In a few cases, they did actually have the
display, but less of a dead end and more of a dead display. So then it ended up
getting thrown in. Oh my god, it's heavy. Oh, it ended up getting thrown in
as a topic for the WAN Show where I kind of jokingly
kind of seriously put out a $10,000
bounty. And when I did that, I will buy it from you for $10,000 if it works so
that I can make a video about it. I was not expecting to actually pay
$10,000. I expected to get nothing other
than the same pictures we had already seen of non- workinging units. And yet,
lo and behold, 10 days later, we got an
email with a link to a video of a new
inbox monitor. Like, look carefully at this. This is actual official packaging
for this thing. We verified the monitor did in fact work and the deal was made.
I'm sure that guy was not expecting to get $6,000 for this ancient technology.
I mean, look at this thing. Even when it's off, the screen's not even black.
There were three variants of this. The Alienware one from CES 2008 where no
price was given. There was an NEC variant that was shown at the 2009 Mac
World event where a hefty $8,000 price
tag was given. Then there's ours, the Astendo Technologies CRVD 43in curved
display. And when this was first sold for a very brief period in 2009 at its
cheapest, it was a uh modest $6,500,
which is kind of crazy because that's actually very close to what we ended up
paying for. Now, at every event where the display was shown, it made
headlines. Anyone who saw it, I mean, look at this 2008 was wowed by both the
curved nature of the display and how wide it is. Like sitting about 2 ft from
it gives you a a natural 90° field of
view. That's actually very comparable to
high-end curved ultrawide displays today. This thing was literally a decade
ahead of its time, which isn't to say that everything about it holds up
particularly well today. Let's start getting it hooked up and talk through
some of the specs. So, in terms of connectivity, DisplayPort, ladies and
gentlemen, didn't exist yet. So, we're going to go ahead and Oh, it's fine.
There's your power input right there, ladies and gentlemen. Got that dual link
DVI input, HDMI port. I would actually be surprised if it runs full res on what
what HDMI version would this have even been? 1.3. Oh, baby. USB 2 hub, though,
ladies and gentlemen. It's a great value at $6,000. The stand looks like cast
aluminum, I guess. 25 lbs without the stand. Well, the stand definitely adds
more weight cuz it's pretty heavy. Wait,
this is single link DVI to HDMI. Why would it come with such a weird stupid
cable? Can I just have like a regular dual link DVI cable? How about HDMI? Oh,
right. We're running like a 2080 or something here. Obviously, it doesn't
have DVI on it, right? Who bought this thing and then never opened it? Oh my
god. Do you hear those fans? It's as loud as a computer.
Whoa. Giant cooling fan right here. Uh, based
on the position, I would say it must be near the power supply cuz the power goes
in right under there. And then check this shizz out. Look at these giant heat
sinks here. It's funny. I didn't think about it, but that totally makes sense
that this would have to have beefy cooling in it because the way that they
built it is unlike anything that I've seen before. So, it's got a 2880x
900 resolution. And how they achieved that and the curvature of the display is
that it's actually instead of being just one display, four DLP LED lit screens in
portrait mode just lined up. So pretty
much it's kind of full of projectors.
What's cool about being DLP though is
that we might actually get a pretty decent gaming experience out of this
thing because it boasts a point. 02
millisecond response time. That's right. We're going to game on it. This is a
classic in terms of uh interface down here. Hey, it works. Wow, that is really
washed out. System error 1508 contact tech support. What are the odds?
Extendo's tech support still around. Uh, some of the other specs, uh, lttore.com,
by the way, include 200 nit peak brightness. Ouch. 10,000 to1 contrast
ratio. Sure, that looks like a bad sign.
100% sRGB coverage and 99% coverage of
the Adobe RGB color space. Uh, should I be worried about that? So, let's try the
power cycle trick here. Wow, it has like
a boot down sequence almost. You can like hear the power supply.
Yes. Oh, wow. It actually looks a lot better, too, now that it's warmed up.
That's crazy. You can still absolutely
see the seams between the projectors. Like, it's Hello. So, right there, right
there, right there, and right there,
there's your four. Are they LED back lit? Yep. That would
have been like crazy town technology at
the time. That's insane. Check it out from this angle. Like, see how stark
those lines are between the the projectors. To be clear, it's not great,
but it's not that bad. Actually, let's
give it a little calibrate.
Calibrate. Wow. Look at this. It's got a menu and everything. I would have given
basically anything for this 10 years ago. So, you're actually aligning the
two different projectors. Holy crap.
So, it can move them. It can move them.
You got to be kidding me. It's definitely blurriier towards the
outside, but that's pretty typical of a projection style display. Okay. So, how
do you make white smooth? Okay, then.
Oh, I see. So, it's adjusting the
brightness at the at the meeting point where they overlap. Oh, that's a little
better, actually. I just darkened it a bit more. Uh, information. Yes, please
tell me more information. 2880 by 900 60
Hz native sync type digital. Yeah. Okay.
In terms of responsiveness here,
yeah, for a 60 Hz display, it's not bad.
Like it feels it feels fine. Now, there
was a lot of confusion at the time because the thickness, the girth of this
display led people to believe that it was a CRT. but it wasn't. And quite
frankly, that's a bit of an unfortunate thing. If it was a CRT, it would
definitely be even heavier than it is actually by a considerable margin. But
it would also have better image clarity and better brightness. It kind of buzzes
different sounds depending on how much of the display is actually active.
That's so weird. Everything about this thing is so
weird. What even is this aspect ratio? 32x10 in
game. The lines are really not that
noticeable, especially from that twoft sweet spot. Like it's really tuned. Like
if I'm in here, I can make it out. And if I'm out here, I can make it out. But
like right here, holy crap. Like
it feels really responsive.
Like holy crap. My mind would have been
absolutely blown to try something like
this. No wonder it made headlines at every show that they demoed the thing.
Interestingly, I'm not getting any noticeable rainbow effect. And normally,
I find it quite noticeable on DLP displays. I don't know if that just has
to do with the small size of it or my proximity to it or or what the deal is
there. Aendo specialty was LEDs back
then. Interesting.
I mean, the advertised contrast ratio is
obviously complete bull. Um, to put it
as charitably as I possibly can, but
pretty much everything else about it is really impressive. So, when I whip the
camera, like when I pan the camera like this, you see a little bit of display
tearing. But for not having VSSync enabled,
that's normal. What's shocking to me, so here, if we turn VSYNC on,
what's shocking to me is that in between
the displays, I don't notice anything like I don't
notice like a kind of a compression expansion kind of artifact or or
anything like that. It just it really does feel like one big display. There's
things that they lied about for sure, but there's also things they got really,
really right. Gaming aside, from like a
creative standpoint, something like this would have been absolutely
game-changing. With that said, I think you'd still need another display for
certain types of work. Like, I mean, if I was doing anything that I expected to
be color accurate on here, get real. It might have that gamut
coverage or whatever, but I mean with the amount of, you know, fringing for
example on borders and with how much
variation there is with a single color across the entire width of the display.
Like here, you can see how the start menu is like kind of pink over on this
side and then it's more like dark here.
There's no way that you'd be doing any kind of like color accurate work. But
from just a a sheer screen real estate
standpoint, we're looking at a very modern amount of screen real estate for,
you know, timelines and uh you know, media bins and graphics and all that
kind of stuff. Like this again would have been absolutely
mindblowing to 10 years ago me. In
conclusion, as a 10year ago tech demo, absolutely
freaking unreal, I don't know that I would have spent this kind of money on
it, just because there are some serious quality of life problems with it with
respect to, you know, the changes in the zones, particularly the the maximum
brightness is really not great. Contrast isn't great. But as a 10 years ago tech
demo, unfreaking real. Uh, I'm still not stoked that I
paid six grand for it, but hey, maybe we'll do a live stream. You want to see
a tear down live stream tearown? Let us know in the comments below. Let's get
let's squeeze two videos out of this thing. Let's make make up some some
ground there. Um, make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. If
you guys are looking for another video to watch right now, maybe check out uh
oh, this one on the light field hollow display. That's like, you know,
tomorrow's technology today instead of today's technology