Well, another round of trade shows is upon us and once again the marketing spinnerets are at work spinning nonsense into innovation and trying to capture the consumer in the web.

We’ve seen it all year with the misuse of the term 4k and with the unnecessary curving of our LCD and OLED screens, and now we see it combined in the ultimate shark-jumping accumulation of “who cares” innovation.

I first saw the story on this new Samsung set here.  It’s a 105″ curved display, but with an added feature: It can change from a curved to a flat screen at the whim of the viewer.

If curved screens are really better for viewing, why would you want to do this anyway?  It just goes to show that the curve isn’t an improvement, just a ploy, and one that it seems not everyone even likes.  Can you imagine buying this, using the curve to flat feature a couple times, and then inevitably just leaving it in your preferred position after that indefinitely?  Go a step further, and perhaps you find your preferred position is flat, how ironic would that be?

I can’t deny it would be cool to watch change shape once or twice or to show your friends, but that is really where the magic stops.

In this case, the 4k flexible display is actually not 4k anyway, (it’s 2160p in an anamorphic format) meaning that you can now watch the majority of your stretched or black-bar framed, up-scaled content on a screen that could change shape if you actually wanted it to.

Now of course if all this shape shifting came at a small premium it may just be worth the price of admission, but according to the article, it seems all this bending action would come at the bargain price of an additional $110,000. At that price point, I’m pretty sure consumers will be telling Samsung to get bent instead.