When purchasing a gaming monitor, one of the first things you must do is decide whether a flat or curved surface best suits your needs. There are pros and cons to both. Curved screens can increase immersion in the game and reduce eye strain, but they are also prone to glare and are not ideal for designers working with straight lines.

But Korean display specialist LG has another way: at the 2021 CES, LG Display will be introducing a 48-inch OLED gaming monitor that can switch from flat to curved with the push of a button, the Bendable CSO ( Cinematic Sound OLED) display, which will be demonstrated.

This is a very exciting development, given that LG makes some of the best OLED TVs, and the company promises that the screen will provide "uniform viewing distance from the center of the screen to the edge."

In addition to expanding to a curvature radius of up to 1,000R, the screen has a few other tricks up its sleeve, including the "cinematic sound" mentioned in its working title. Underneath the panel is a 0.6mm film exciter that turns the screen into a speaker, and LG suggests that having sound coming directly from the screen makes gaming sessions more immersive.

OLED technology is rapidly gaining traction in the TV and phone markets, but has not been as widely adopted in PC gaming. However, OLEDs have certain advantages: each pixel emits light individually, resulting in an infinite contrast ratio and excellent image quality (although overall brightness is lower). Here, LG promises a response time of 0.1 millisecond, which should be sufficient for even the most tetchy shooters.

For the most demanding gamers, however, there is a weakness, and that is the refresh rate; LG Display's Bendable CSO supports variable refresh rates from 40Hz to 120Hz, which is more than adequate for top-class TVs (120Hz is just available via HDMI 2.1), but the best gaming monitors tend to reach a minimum of 144Hz and a maximum of 360Hz. Refresh rate is a fairly big deal for performance gamers, since it directly affects the number of frames per second that can be displayed (i.e., a 120Hz screen is capped at 120fps).

Still, 120 fps is by no means slow, and many gamers may accept its drawbacks due to the ability to switch between curved and flat screen games at the touch of a button. For now, though, this is just a concept, with no price or release date yet. However, if it captures the imagination at the 2021 CES, LG Display's curved OLED could be commercially available as soon as possible.