The Obsession with Vanishing Screen Bezels: Is It Just Hype?
The “glasses” of a monitor or a television are the frame around the part of the screen which shows a visible image. Over the years, the desire for thinner and thinner glasses has reached a sometimes unreasonable level, and the push to eliminate them completely has not decreased.
But why do we care as much about the quantity of frame around our screens? There are quite reasonable reasons, but in other cases, it may be a bit silly.
A brief history of glasses
Domestic televisions and subsequent computer monitors used CRT or Cathode ray tube Technology to create images. The main part of a CRT display is a large and heavy glass tube, which makes these screens heavy and fragile. It is therefore not surprising that these televisions need thick and robust cases, which causes large glasses.
It is my late 90s in the early 2000s, 34 -inch Sony Trinitron television, and although the screen / jars ratio is quite decent, it is always a fairly thick frame.
Likewise, this pretty Sun Microsystems monitor that I bought from a renovator is a 17 -inch monitor with a thick and thick bezel all around.
Not that it bothers me, because to move this instructor, it seems solid, and the same goes for my 150 pound television, which is at best a job of three people to move.
Things have improved a lot with flat panel screens, but even the glasses of my first 19 -inch LCD monitor were in no way thin. The glasses on my 34 -inch ultrairs daily work instructor are there, but most of the screen is actually visible.
When we arrive at devices like my M4 MacBook Pro, the glasses have practically disappeared. The only reason the upper telescope is more substantial is to accommodate the integrated webcam.
Not only are the best current monitors, using technologies like mini-LED and OLED, almost without glasses, they are also incredibly thin. This could not have been easy to achieve, but it is clear that the engineers were determined to reduce the glasses by customer requests. Which raises the question – Why did we demand it in the first place?
Border psychology
The first reason I can think of seeing with a value for money. If I buy a 17 -inch instructor but 15 of these diagonal thumbs are visible, it looks a bit like being cheated. This is why, with instructors and televisions over the years, specifications have cited both the total measurement and the visible area.
While flat panels on, for example, laptops may have remained of the same size, the visible effective size of the screen has increased without the size of the device worsening. It is a better deal in itself, not to mention how the real quality of the image has improved.
But the glasses do not only take physical space – they can also change the way we perceive the image. Thin glasses offer a more immersive experience, because we do not see the frame around the image. This is the same reason why people prefer borderless windows or on -board edge photos: our brains interpret them as larger and modern.
It also seems that people combine thinner glasses and more minimalism with more advanced and premium technology. It is as if you could just look at the “chin” of a phone and immediately know if it is a cheap entry -level model or a flagship product.
When the glasses really count
Glasses are not only a question of aesthetics, whether thick or thin, they can serve a practical objective and have different effects on the conviviality of different types of devices. My iPad Pro, for example, has relatively thick glasses compared to my MacBook, but unlike Mac, I am supposed to keep the device while using it, and glasses give me something to hold without obscuring the screen.
That said, modern tablet and telephone glasses are so thin, software and hardware engineers had to offer sophisticated touch -up rejection technology that you never notice because it works so well.
If you use monitors in a multi-monitors configuration, it is generally a good idea to look for screens with thinner glasses, as it can make the experience more transparent. Although personally, I moved to a large ultrairs, with a single satellite screen for peripheral information like emails, instead of having a telescope in the center of my vision.
The future of glasses
The technological industry is constantly trying to erase the glasses entirely. We have seen phones with notches, holes-punch cameras and even under-game sensors-all attempts to maximize real estate on the screen. TV manufacturers do the same, pushing conceptions where the image seems to float without borders.
But will the glasses never disappear entirely? Well, it’s already possible and has already happened. For example, Samsung sells ultra-thin glasses as narrow as 1.8 mm. The idea being that you can build massive video walls using these panels, and at normal distances, such thin glasses will not even be visible. LG has also demonstrated screens without bezel (via Techradar) where two screens can be pushed together and perfectly resemble a single screen.
There are electrical contacts around the edges of these zero-bezel screens, which means that you can build a larger panel from smaller panels without visible seam. In the future, this could be that we get larger screens without needing to buy a 110 inch or more screen. No more trying to get a large screen through a door, and what about the possibility of upgrading your TV later with more panels? It is an interesting notion!
That said, I don’t think screens without glasses will never be common. Simply for practical reasons. To make practical displays to manage for one thing, and we still need room for components such as cameras or antennas, there will always be a little frame around pretty images.
