 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 ultra-wide 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 little known company called Astendo 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 ultra-wide desktop monitor. And it wasn't Alienware, so I did get a bit of a discount, but I still ended up paying $6,000 US for this thing. So it better be really f**king cool. Welcome to, holy s**t, the heaviest monitor that I have yet encountered. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking plates. Check out how Ridge Wallet can keep your bulge down and use offer code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. The genesis of all of this was a Reddit post that was brought up in our weekly writers meeting. It just, it looked 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 US dollars 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-working 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 43-inch curved display. And when this was first sold for a very brief period in 2009, at its cheapest, it was a modest $6,500 US dollars. 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 two feet from it gives you a natural 90-degree field of view. That's actually very comparable to high-end curved ultra-wide 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... Whoa! 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 HDMI version would this have even been? 1.3, oh baby. USB 2.0 hub though, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great value at $6,000. The stand looks like cast aluminum, I guess. 25 pounds without the stand. Well, the stand definitely adds more weight because 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. 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. Based on the position, I would say it must be near the power supply because the power goes in right under there. And then check this shiz 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 2880 by 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 0.02 millisecond response time. That's right, we're gonna game on it. This is a classic in terms of interface down here. Hey, it works. Wow, that is really washed out. System error 1508, contact tech support. What are the odds Stendo's tech support is still around? Some of the other specs, lttstore.com by the way, include 200 nit peak brightness, ouch, 10,000 to one contrast ratio, sure, that looks like a bad sign. 100% sRGB coverage and 99% coverage of the Adobe RGB color space. 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 backlit? 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 projectors? To be clear, it's not great, but it's not that bad actually. Let's give it a little Cali Cali Calbray. 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 blurrier towards the outside, but that's pretty typical of a projection style display. OK, so how do you make white smooth? OK, then. Oh, I see. So it's adjusting the brightness at the meeting point where they overlap. Oh, that's a little better actually. I just darkened it a bit more. Information. Yes, please. Tell me more information. 2880 by 900, 60 Hertz, native sync type digital. Yeah, OK. In terms of responsiveness here, yeah, for a 60 Hertz display, it's not bad. Like 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? 32 by 10 in game? The lines are really not that noticeable, especially from that two foot 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 what the deal is there. Interesting. I mean, the advertised contrast ratio is obviously complete bull. I'm not going 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 VSync 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 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 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's 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 sheer screen real estate standpoint, we're looking at a very modern amount of screen real estate for timelines and media bins and graphics and all that kind of stuff. Like this, again, would have been absolutely mind blowing to 10 years ago me. In conclusion, as a 10 year 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 maximum brightness is really not great, contrast isn't great. But as a 10 years ago tech demo, un-freaking-real, I'm still not stoked that I paid six grand for it, but hey, maybe we'll do a live stream. You wanna see a tear down? Live stream tear down? Let us know in the comments below. Let's get, let's squeeze two videos out of this thing. Let's make up some ground there. 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That's like, you know, tomorrow's technology today instead of today's technology yesterday.