[citation][nom]vaughn2k[/nom]The hood pretty much block the angle views... so much for that![/citation]
I work in the LCD industry. That's not how this works. Viewing angles don't define an instant cutoff point at which monitors suddenly degrade in quality. Rather they define a point at which the display's performance has dropped below acceptable parameters (for example, a point at which the contrast ratio is no longer more than 20:1). That's a shockingly low number, right? The datasheet will define what these parameters are, but of course you end customers don't get to see those usually.
If you have a 175+ degree display, try it. Try looking at it from that angle and telling me it looks even remotely like it does head-on. That number means nothing to you as a consumer. Just another number that sounds good, like dynamic contrast ratios.
So we see the big performance difference at even angles within the quoted viewing angle range. This becomes a problem if the display is large, because it is so large that you can actually see a difference in performance across the surface of the monitor simply because the viewing angle of the edges of the monitor with respect to your eyes are so much different to the portion of the monitor directly in front of you.
To prevent this, you need wide viewing angle panels, so the perceived performance doesn't drop between the middle and edges in normal use... But as we discussed, that results in ridiculous numbers because now the display reaches that threshold at a very wide angle. But that 178 degree number still doesn't actually mean a lot. So you end up with displays quoting wild 175+ angles because someone in marketing thought it sounded good, when in actuality at that angle the performance is terrible for real use and the display probably deteriorates visibly at 150 degrees or less.