This thread made me cry. I've never heard anyone refer to a widescreen monitor as a "shortscreen." Comparing a piece of paper with a monitor? Go buy a "shortcreen" monitor that can rotate and set it vertical. Let me know how that works for you.
Agreed. This is one of the silliest rants I have seen in a while. I imagine a guy complaining back in the day about how hardly no one wants to make black and white TVs any more. Movies are filmed in widescreen because real life is in wide screen. The funniest part is the implication that a 21' widescreen monitor somehow has less viewable area than a 21" 4:3 monitor. I hate to pile on, and without reading the entire thread, I'm sure the OP isn't seeing a lot of people agree with him.... I just couldn't help but comment.
It basically boils down to monitors and TVs are moving to how the eye naturally sees, in panoramic view.
How the eye naturally sees entails peripheral vision to a 180 degree angle on the sides, which isn't possible with a flat monitor. You'd have to wrap around to do that, and I don't see this as movement in that direction.
I guess I should have said closer to how we naturally see.
Warp around monitors may not be as far off as you think...
Maybe not full 180 but Alienware was toying with something close, back in 2008.
Alienware was making a 42" DLP monitor that was curved, with a 2880x900 resolution.
The guy in the video said it was seamless but you can see it's not. The seams were quite visible.
It basically boils down to monitors and TVs are moving to how the eye naturally sees, in panoramic view.
How the eye naturally sees entails peripheral vision to a 180 degree angle on the sides, which isn't possible with a flat monitor. You'd have to wrap around to do that, and I don't see this as movement in that direction. Well, I guess you could argue that a monitor being flat is movement away from how the old CRTs would be curved in the opposite direction, but the movement away from that ended before the transition to LCD monitors, even.
And yes, I understand why monitor manufacturers measure them they way they do. It's about the same reason that if you take the size of a hard drive as the manufacturer tells you, you have to multiply by about .93 to get what Windows will tell you the hard drive size is, because hard drive manufacturers use a different definition of gigabyte. For a 1 TB or larger, it's a smaller mutiple yet.
Trying to cram as much ignorance into one post as you possibly can, I guess.
Listen. People smarter than you (you know, with degrees on this sort of thing, DOCTORS) have explained how the eye naturally moves and views. It has nothing to do with curving the screen towards you (though people are trying that sort of thing now for other reasons). It's because the eye naturally moves along a horizontal viewspace. Our view is an enlongated ovalesque figure because we have two eyes with an overlapping field of vision along a horizontal spectrum. The area of vision that is both binocular and easily focused is an enlonged ovalesque shape. The shape of the monitor is an enlongated rectangle.
There's a reason why monitors are generally bigger now. Used to be ~15" to ~19" for consumer-range monitors. Now you generally see 17" to 24" since widescreen is the standard. Face it: widescreen is nothing but a good thing. You're not being shortchanged screen real-estate, and despite whatever imbecilic ranting you do, you're basically complaining because monitors have transitioned to a new format.
There are two reasons for the larger numbers. One is that monitor sizes have simply been increasing for a long time. This is kind of analgous to other computer components: processors get faster, hard drives get bigger, etc. Improvements in monitors have been far slower than those, of course, but moving from monochrome to color and more recently from CRT to LCD were also improvements.
The other reason for larger diagonal measurements is that being less square means that a screen of the same area has a longer diagonal. A 19" monitor at a 5:4 aspect ratio is about 11.87" tall and 14.84" wide, for a total of 176.1 square inches. A 19" monitor at a 16:9 aspect ratio is about 9.31" tall and 16.56" wide, for a total of 154.3 square inches. If the shape didn't matter at all, but only the total area, then the former monitor is more than 14% bigger than the latter, even if they have the same 19" diagonal measurement.
But even that is assuming that shape doesn't matter. Shape most certainly does matter. If it didn't, would you be perfectly happy using a monitor 200" wide and 1" tall? That's undeniably larger in terms of area than a 19" monitor of any aspect ratio. But the awkward shape makes nearly all of that area unuseable for most purposes.
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Perhaps eventually programs will adjust for the new shape, moving all bars and various other displays to the sides, instead of putting a lot at the top and bottom of the screen as most programs do now. That could manage to preserve the same shape of useable space if, for example, the text on the screen when you're browsing goes from the very top to the very bottom of the monitor. The only net effect of having shorter but wider screens would be to have to move the mouse further whenever you want to click on anything, since you'd have to go off the side of the main area rather than off the top or bottom. That wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, but I hardly view it as being some great improvement.
There's a reason most computer monitors use the 16:10 aspect ratio. You don't seem to be understanding the difference between screen size and resolution.
Additionally, size increases in monitors are not a part of the regular improvement of electronics. You do realize we have huge TVs using the same technology, and have for a while. We had massive CRT monitors too, but nobody used them because they were unnecessary and generally expensive. Monitors are bigger now because the idea of a widescreen monitor is to have more space on the sides. The measurement naturally increases due to the additional spaces on the sides, but not to the degree that we've seen consumer monitors grow.
Honestly if you think the sizes of current LCDs is due to technological improvements, you've shown yet another thing you haven't a damned clue about.
Originally posted by skeaser Good points except for the "stretch" effect. A good game is programmed to use the aspect ratio, not just stretch it out.
It's not a game programming issue. It's simple mathematics. If the ground is flat and level and you draw a circle on the grouind, as viewed from directly above, it looks just as wide as it is tall. As viewed from low to the ground, it looks much wider than it is tall. As viewed from the optimal angle in a typical 3D game, it will appear somewhat wider than it is tall, perhaps by enough to justify making the ideal monitor shape a little wider than it is tall, but not by a huge margin.
Super big hint: the extra space on the sides of widescreen monitors increases your field of vision. The picture isn't stretched across the screen.
The picture will look exactly the same, except you'll see more on the right and left.
Older games that were created before widescreen monitors become popular obviously weren't created in this way. So, it is, in fact, a programming issue.
Originally posted by skeaser Good points except for the "stretch" effect. A good game is programmed to use the aspect ratio, not just stretch it out.
It's not a game programming issue. It's simple mathematics. If the ground is flat and level and you draw a circle on the grouind, as viewed from directly above, it looks just as wide as it is tall. As viewed from low to the ground, it looks much wider than it is tall. As viewed from the optimal angle in a typical 3D game, it will appear somewhat wider than it is tall, perhaps by enough to justify making the ideal monitor shape a little wider than it is tall, but not by a huge margin.
Super big hint: the extra space on the sides of widescreen monitors increases your field of vision. The picture isn't stretched across the screen.
The picture will look exactly the same, except you'll see more on the right and left.
Older games that were created before widescreen monitors become popular obviously weren't created in this way. So, it is, in fact, a programming issue.
Edit: Sorry for the triple post.
To answer your other post, I'm well aware of the difference between the physical displayed area of a monitor and the resolution. It's likely technologically possible to make a 4" monitor with a 6400x4000 resolution. If it isn't now, then it presumably will be in the future. But you wouldn't call that a "big" monitor, would you?
You're arguing that the only difference between a shortscreen monitor and a normal one is that the latter has more room on the sides. That's only true if you assume that the former monitor is a much larger size, as otherwise, you also lose room on the top and bottom. If you assume a much larger size, then it's a much more expensive monitor. If all new processors costing under $1000 were discontinued, I'd complain about that, too, even though a processor that costs that much (3.2 GHz i7 is around there now) is a lot nicer than what I have now.
And even if we do assume for the sake of argument that a much larger size only adds additional area on the sides, the problem is that there's nothing there to see. Look at the sides of the monitor you're using right now. There's a bunch of dark blue space with nothing there. It's harmless, really, even if it looks kind of bad. Even so, it's hardly peculiar to this forum. I went through all of my bookmarks and could only find two that didn't do something analogous, typically of a different color. Switching to a shortscreen monitor would only add a lot more empty space.
A lot of the sites would have a lot more empty space on the sides on this monitor, too, except for advertisements dotted along the sides because the space isn't really useable for the main content of the site. So basically if everyone gets the wider monitors, all that does for a typical web site is create more room for advertisements? And I'm supposed to pay for that? It sure doesn't create more room for content. On my 26" widescreen at work, any site that doesn't center the text is awkward to read because it's way off to the side.
That's hardly peculiar to Internet browsing, either. If I want to read a .pdf file, type a paper, or read or send e-mail, if the text goes all the way from one side to the other on a widescreen monitor, it's a pain to go back and forth that much to read it. That also makes the text huge so that I have to scroll down a lot more often. Sure, I can center the window and make it smaller, but again, that's only paying for a bunch of extra space where there's nothing there.
In a lot of games, having extra space on the sides just means that the game draws more scenery with nothing there, or at least nothing there that matters to me from where I am. That serves no purpose apart from bogging down my video card and hurting my frame rate, which is outright detrimental to gameplay. I could zoom in to push relevant stuff further to the sides, but that cuts necessary stuff off the top and bottom of the screen, which is again detrimental to gameplay. In some 2D games, the extra space on the sides could be marginally useful, but far less so than adding the same amount of space at the top and bottom. The advantage of the shorter resolution comes only from assuming that it is a much larger monitor; compare a 22" normal monitor to a 15" widescreen and the former will seem a lot bigger.
Your complaints would be valid if the extra screen space wasn't useful in a variety of applications. That's not the case. Just because you don't know how to center and scale damn word processing window (fyi because of my monitor and resolution I can view two pages of text side-by-side if I wish) doesn't mean that widescreen monitors are useless.
Your complaints would be valid if you paid more for equivalent widescreen and narrowscreen monitors. You don't. A cursory glance at Newegg could show you that prices vary widely for LCD monitors, with the screen size and type only being a small part of the overall picture.
Your complaints about "losing space on the top and bottom" would make sense if that was even the case. Widescreen monitors generally have larger resolutions than narrowscreen monitors. If having a physically smaller monitor bothers you, you can purchase a bigger monitor (imagine that).
In a lot of games, having extra space on the sides just means that the game draws more scenery with nothing there, or at least nothing there that matters to me from where I am. That serves no purpose apart from bogging down my video card and hurting my frame rate, which is outright detrimental to gameplay.
Actually, in "most games" having a wider viewing area gives one a distinct advantage. Despite your apparent inability to understand the difference between resolution and screen size (regardless of your claims) a widescreen monitor generally affords greater overall viewing space, both vertical and horizontal. Widescreen monitor resolutions continue to climb (I own one with a 1680x1050 resolution and another with a 1920x1200 resolution, both cost around $250) whereas narrowscreen monitors tend to cap out at around 1280x1024 (with anything with a greater resolution often costing in excess of $600.) Widescreen monitors can have greater resolutions with similar sizes because you can actually see the whole screen at once because it doesn't possess excess vertical space. They're cheaper because the narrow form factor is easier to design at greater sizes to a sufficient quality.
Further, if your conscience had bothered you a bit about being completely oblivious to the subject at hand, you might have taken a moment to realize that if you didn't want a widescreen view in your video game you could simply change the resolution to the approrpiate narrowscreen equivalent.
Blank space exists on the sides of webpages because they must be made to be comfortable at the most common resolution for most users (the majority being on older monitors, with a resolution of 1024x768). Website design is a delicate process, and most webmasters would rather not risk designing a website that can have both a large and small resolution display, because doing so whilst still retaining the look and feel of the website (and avoiding bugs) is terribly difficult. As users upgrade their monitors, the most common resolution will rise, and more website designers will create their sites with this in mind. Even still, plenty of websites already do make use of the extra space, and further one can quite adequately make use of the extra space on their own with multiple windows or applications open at the same time. This ability to easily multitask is one exclusive to users of widescreen monitors.
Your complaints basically stem from ignorance and a refusal to adapt.
Everybody else got over the changing, realized why widescreen was superior, and incorporated those benefits into their everyday usage.
The human eye doesn't see in 4:3, 16:9 is much mroe akin to the aspect ratio of the human eye.
I have a 27'' monitor and I'd hate it if it was 4:3, it would be like 3 feet tall. Once you game in 16:9/16:10 on a decently sized monitor (16:9 really comes into its own at 22'' and above) you'll see how it's so much more immersive.
Not to mention widescreen monitors posses an orientation eerily close to the golden ratio, which helps explain why they're more pleasing to the eye sitting on your desk than the awkward square we used to have to deal with.
Technically there is more room in all aspects of a widescreen monitor even if physcially there isn't - though I do see 22" widescreen monitors at the same price of decent 19" 5:4 which I imagine are the same height . The common resolution widescreen display is 1680x1050, while the common 5:4 monitor is 1280x1024. That means there are 400 more pixels in width, as well as 26 more pixels in height. The larger the monitor is while staying at the same resolution the higher the dot pitch is (the distance between pixels). Obviously on smaller monitors the resolution is achieved by placing the pixels much closer together.
This is the *real* reason widescreen monitors are slightly more expensive: there are 453,280 more pixels in 1680x1050 than 1280x1024.
Now, if 1600x1200 monitors had become more popular (cheaper) maybe they would negate the point above - except they would be directly competing with 1900x1200 monitors, rather than the 1680x1050 ones. Unfortunately 1600x1200 is only useful (or cheaply produceable) at large screen sizes, and the real market for larger screen sizes fully appreciates 1920x1200. Thing is, if you want to buy something that no one else gives a damn about, you're gonna have to pay extra, and that's where the 1600x1200 market is.
The funny thing is, monitors were only 4:3 because TV's were, and TV's were only 4:3 because movies were, and movies were only 4:3 because Thomas Edison held up his fingers in a square and said to cut the film like this. None of that had anything to do with your productivity on your PC.
Widescreen has become the new standard because TV's and movies are widescreen.
It is cheaper to mass produce one type (widescreen) for both TV's and computers than to produce a different type of screen for TV and computing.
Whether or not one type of monitor is superior to the other for computing would depend on what applications you are running. The older style monitors are probably not worth the additional cost and have the disadvantage that eventually newer software will not support or not be optomised for the old style monitors. Conversely, very old software that does not support or is not optomised for widescreen may look and perform better on on old style monitors.
Comments
Agreed. This is one of the silliest rants I have seen in a while. I imagine a guy complaining back in the day about how hardly no one wants to make black and white TVs any more. Movies are filmed in widescreen because real life is in wide screen. The funniest part is the implication that a 21' widescreen monitor somehow has less viewable area than a 21" 4:3 monitor. I hate to pile on, and without reading the entire thread, I'm sure the OP isn't seeing a lot of people agree with him.... I just couldn't help but comment.
-----Zero Punctuation Eve Online Review-----
How the eye naturally sees entails peripheral vision to a 180 degree angle on the sides, which isn't possible with a flat monitor. You'd have to wrap around to do that, and I don't see this as movement in that direction.
I guess I should have said closer to how we naturally see.
Warp around monitors may not be as far off as you think...
Maybe not full 180 but Alienware was toying with something close, back in 2008.
Alienware was making a 42" DLP monitor that was curved, with a 2880x900 resolution.
The guy in the video said it was seamless but you can see it's not. The seams were quite visible.
I don't think it ever hit the market.
How the eye naturally sees entails peripheral vision to a 180 degree angle on the sides, which isn't possible with a flat monitor. You'd have to wrap around to do that, and I don't see this as movement in that direction. Well, I guess you could argue that a monitor being flat is movement away from how the old CRTs would be curved in the opposite direction, but the movement away from that ended before the transition to LCD monitors, even.
And yes, I understand why monitor manufacturers measure them they way they do. It's about the same reason that if you take the size of a hard drive as the manufacturer tells you, you have to multiply by about .93 to get what Windows will tell you the hard drive size is, because hard drive manufacturers use a different definition of gigabyte. For a 1 TB or larger, it's a smaller mutiple yet.
Trying to cram as much ignorance into one post as you possibly can, I guess.
Listen. People smarter than you (you know, with degrees on this sort of thing, DOCTORS) have explained how the eye naturally moves and views. It has nothing to do with curving the screen towards you (though people are trying that sort of thing now for other reasons). It's because the eye naturally moves along a horizontal viewspace. Our view is an enlongated ovalesque figure because we have two eyes with an overlapping field of vision along a horizontal spectrum. The area of vision that is both binocular and easily focused is an enlonged ovalesque shape. The shape of the monitor is an enlongated rectangle.
FIGURE IT OUT
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There are two reasons for the larger numbers. One is that monitor sizes have simply been increasing for a long time. This is kind of analgous to other computer components: processors get faster, hard drives get bigger, etc. Improvements in monitors have been far slower than those, of course, but moving from monochrome to color and more recently from CRT to LCD were also improvements.
The other reason for larger diagonal measurements is that being less square means that a screen of the same area has a longer diagonal. A 19" monitor at a 5:4 aspect ratio is about 11.87" tall and 14.84" wide, for a total of 176.1 square inches. A 19" monitor at a 16:9 aspect ratio is about 9.31" tall and 16.56" wide, for a total of 154.3 square inches. If the shape didn't matter at all, but only the total area, then the former monitor is more than 14% bigger than the latter, even if they have the same 19" diagonal measurement.
But even that is assuming that shape doesn't matter. Shape most certainly does matter. If it didn't, would you be perfectly happy using a monitor 200" wide and 1" tall? That's undeniably larger in terms of area than a 19" monitor of any aspect ratio. But the awkward shape makes nearly all of that area unuseable for most purposes.
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Perhaps eventually programs will adjust for the new shape, moving all bars and various other displays to the sides, instead of putting a lot at the top and bottom of the screen as most programs do now. That could manage to preserve the same shape of useable space if, for example, the text on the screen when you're browsing goes from the very top to the very bottom of the monitor. The only net effect of having shorter but wider screens would be to have to move the mouse further whenever you want to click on anything, since you'd have to go off the side of the main area rather than off the top or bottom. That wouldn't be so bad, I suppose, but I hardly view it as being some great improvement.
There's a reason most computer monitors use the 16:10 aspect ratio. You don't seem to be understanding the difference between screen size and resolution.
Additionally, size increases in monitors are not a part of the regular improvement of electronics. You do realize we have huge TVs using the same technology, and have for a while. We had massive CRT monitors too, but nobody used them because they were unnecessary and generally expensive. Monitors are bigger now because the idea of a widescreen monitor is to have more space on the sides. The measurement naturally increases due to the additional spaces on the sides, but not to the degree that we've seen consumer monitors grow.
Honestly if you think the sizes of current LCDs is due to technological improvements, you've shown yet another thing you haven't a damned clue about.
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It's not a game programming issue. It's simple mathematics. If the ground is flat and level and you draw a circle on the grouind, as viewed from directly above, it looks just as wide as it is tall. As viewed from low to the ground, it looks much wider than it is tall. As viewed from the optimal angle in a typical 3D game, it will appear somewhat wider than it is tall, perhaps by enough to justify making the ideal monitor shape a little wider than it is tall, but not by a huge margin.
Super big hint: the extra space on the sides of widescreen monitors increases your field of vision. The picture isn't stretched across the screen.
The picture will look exactly the same, except you'll see more on the right and left.
Older games that were created before widescreen monitors become popular obviously weren't created in this way. So, it is, in fact, a programming issue.
Edit: Sorry for the triple post.
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It's not a game programming issue. It's simple mathematics. If the ground is flat and level and you draw a circle on the grouind, as viewed from directly above, it looks just as wide as it is tall. As viewed from low to the ground, it looks much wider than it is tall. As viewed from the optimal angle in a typical 3D game, it will appear somewhat wider than it is tall, perhaps by enough to justify making the ideal monitor shape a little wider than it is tall, but not by a huge margin.
Super big hint: the extra space on the sides of widescreen monitors increases your field of vision. The picture isn't stretched across the screen.
The picture will look exactly the same, except you'll see more on the right and left.
Older games that were created before widescreen monitors become popular obviously weren't created in this way. So, it is, in fact, a programming issue.
Edit: Sorry for the triple post.
To answer your other post, I'm well aware of the difference between the physical displayed area of a monitor and the resolution. It's likely technologically possible to make a 4" monitor with a 6400x4000 resolution. If it isn't now, then it presumably will be in the future. But you wouldn't call that a "big" monitor, would you?
You're arguing that the only difference between a shortscreen monitor and a normal one is that the latter has more room on the sides. That's only true if you assume that the former monitor is a much larger size, as otherwise, you also lose room on the top and bottom. If you assume a much larger size, then it's a much more expensive monitor. If all new processors costing under $1000 were discontinued, I'd complain about that, too, even though a processor that costs that much (3.2 GHz i7 is around there now) is a lot nicer than what I have now.
And even if we do assume for the sake of argument that a much larger size only adds additional area on the sides, the problem is that there's nothing there to see. Look at the sides of the monitor you're using right now. There's a bunch of dark blue space with nothing there. It's harmless, really, even if it looks kind of bad. Even so, it's hardly peculiar to this forum. I went through all of my bookmarks and could only find two that didn't do something analogous, typically of a different color. Switching to a shortscreen monitor would only add a lot more empty space.
A lot of the sites would have a lot more empty space on the sides on this monitor, too, except for advertisements dotted along the sides because the space isn't really useable for the main content of the site. So basically if everyone gets the wider monitors, all that does for a typical web site is create more room for advertisements? And I'm supposed to pay for that? It sure doesn't create more room for content. On my 26" widescreen at work, any site that doesn't center the text is awkward to read because it's way off to the side.
That's hardly peculiar to Internet browsing, either. If I want to read a .pdf file, type a paper, or read or send e-mail, if the text goes all the way from one side to the other on a widescreen monitor, it's a pain to go back and forth that much to read it. That also makes the text huge so that I have to scroll down a lot more often. Sure, I can center the window and make it smaller, but again, that's only paying for a bunch of extra space where there's nothing there.
In a lot of games, having extra space on the sides just means that the game draws more scenery with nothing there, or at least nothing there that matters to me from where I am. That serves no purpose apart from bogging down my video card and hurting my frame rate, which is outright detrimental to gameplay. I could zoom in to push relevant stuff further to the sides, but that cuts necessary stuff off the top and bottom of the screen, which is again detrimental to gameplay. In some 2D games, the extra space on the sides could be marginally useful, but far less so than adding the same amount of space at the top and bottom. The advantage of the shorter resolution comes only from assuming that it is a much larger monitor; compare a 22" normal monitor to a 15" widescreen and the former will seem a lot bigger.
Your complaints would be valid if the extra screen space wasn't useful in a variety of applications. That's not the case. Just because you don't know how to center and scale damn word processing window (fyi because of my monitor and resolution I can view two pages of text side-by-side if I wish) doesn't mean that widescreen monitors are useless.
Your complaints would be valid if you paid more for equivalent widescreen and narrowscreen monitors. You don't. A cursory glance at Newegg could show you that prices vary widely for LCD monitors, with the screen size and type only being a small part of the overall picture.
Your complaints about "losing space on the top and bottom" would make sense if that was even the case. Widescreen monitors generally have larger resolutions than narrowscreen monitors. If having a physically smaller monitor bothers you, you can purchase a bigger monitor (imagine that).
Actually, in "most games" having a wider viewing area gives one a distinct advantage. Despite your apparent inability to understand the difference between resolution and screen size (regardless of your claims) a widescreen monitor generally affords greater overall viewing space, both vertical and horizontal. Widescreen monitor resolutions continue to climb (I own one with a 1680x1050 resolution and another with a 1920x1200 resolution, both cost around $250) whereas narrowscreen monitors tend to cap out at around 1280x1024 (with anything with a greater resolution often costing in excess of $600.) Widescreen monitors can have greater resolutions with similar sizes because you can actually see the whole screen at once because it doesn't possess excess vertical space. They're cheaper because the narrow form factor is easier to design at greater sizes to a sufficient quality.
Further, if your conscience had bothered you a bit about being completely oblivious to the subject at hand, you might have taken a moment to realize that if you didn't want a widescreen view in your video game you could simply change the resolution to the approrpiate narrowscreen equivalent.
Blank space exists on the sides of webpages because they must be made to be comfortable at the most common resolution for most users (the majority being on older monitors, with a resolution of 1024x768). Website design is a delicate process, and most webmasters would rather not risk designing a website that can have both a large and small resolution display, because doing so whilst still retaining the look and feel of the website (and avoiding bugs) is terribly difficult. As users upgrade their monitors, the most common resolution will rise, and more website designers will create their sites with this in mind. Even still, plenty of websites already do make use of the extra space, and further one can quite adequately make use of the extra space on their own with multiple windows or applications open at the same time. This ability to easily multitask is one exclusive to users of widescreen monitors.
Your complaints basically stem from ignorance and a refusal to adapt.
Everybody else got over the changing, realized why widescreen was superior, and incorporated those benefits into their everyday usage.
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The human eye doesn't see in 4:3, 16:9 is much mroe akin to the aspect ratio of the human eye.
I have a 27'' monitor and I'd hate it if it was 4:3, it would be like 3 feet tall. Once you game in 16:9/16:10 on a decently sized monitor (16:9 really comes into its own at 22'' and above) you'll see how it's so much more immersive.
Not to mention widescreen monitors posses an orientation eerily close to the golden ratio, which helps explain why they're more pleasing to the eye sitting on your desk than the awkward square we used to have to deal with.
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Technically there is more room in all aspects of a widescreen monitor even if physcially there isn't - though I do see 22" widescreen monitors at the same price of decent 19" 5:4 which I imagine are the same height . The common resolution widescreen display is 1680x1050, while the common 5:4 monitor is 1280x1024. That means there are 400 more pixels in width, as well as 26 more pixels in height. The larger the monitor is while staying at the same resolution the higher the dot pitch is (the distance between pixels). Obviously on smaller monitors the resolution is achieved by placing the pixels much closer together.
This is the *real* reason widescreen monitors are slightly more expensive: there are 453,280 more pixels in 1680x1050 than 1280x1024.
Now, if 1600x1200 monitors had become more popular (cheaper) maybe they would negate the point above - except they would be directly competing with 1900x1200 monitors, rather than the 1680x1050 ones. Unfortunately 1600x1200 is only useful (or cheaply produceable) at large screen sizes, and the real market for larger screen sizes fully appreciates 1920x1200. Thing is, if you want to buy something that no one else gives a damn about, you're gonna have to pay extra, and that's where the 1600x1200 market is.
The funny thing is, monitors were only 4:3 because TV's were, and TV's were only 4:3 because movies were, and movies were only 4:3 because Thomas Edison held up his fingers in a square and said to cut the film like this. None of that had anything to do with your productivity on your PC.
Widescreen has become the new standard because TV's and movies are widescreen.
It is cheaper to mass produce one type (widescreen) for both TV's and computers than to produce a different type of screen for TV and computing.
Whether or not one type of monitor is superior to the other for computing would depend on what applications you are running. The older style monitors are probably not worth the additional cost and have the disadvantage that eventually newer software will not support or not be optomised for the old style monitors. Conversely, very old software that does not support or is not optomised for widescreen may look and perform better on on old style monitors.
Put the display even up/down and right/left to your eye level. The short display stands are annoying too. I use a box to have my display at eye level.
I have a Samsung 24 inch widescreen monitor and it's the best thing that I have bought lately.
It's people like you who complained when color came to the movie screen because they thought that black and white were so much better.