How many curved monitors you need to create a full circle?

I was listening to DotNetRocks podcast episode yesterday and while the talk went bit off-topic (which is fine for me), one interesting question popped up. How many curved monitors you’d need to make a full circle? And I immediately thought: “That should be easy to calculate, no?".

Sadly, I forgot what monitor exactly the guys were talking about (and I’d too bored to listen again), so I took #1 curved monitor bigger than 30 inches on Alza.cz and Alzashop.com, which was Samsung C49HG90 and Fujitsu B34-9 UE at the time of writing. The Samsung has radius of R1800, while the Fujitsu has R1900. But the radius is not enough. Some kind of width or angle is needed as well. The width is easiest to find. I suppose (I don’t have curved monitors to check this) it’s the “straight width”, not taking into account the curvature. Samsung has 1203 mm and Fujitsu 816 mm. With that I can compute the length of the arc and then divide with it the circumference.

The R1800 has a circumference of 11309,7 mm. The R1900 has circumference of 11938,1 mm. Now I need to find the length of the arc. The circular segment page on Wikipedia conveniently has all I need. For Samsung the length is 1226,6 mm and for Fujitsu 822,4 mm.

Thus for Samsung you’d need 9-10 monitors and for Fujitsu 14-15 monitors to get full circle. If you’re gonna do it, don’t forget to order a “few” graphic cards. 😎