andrewducker | Question for you.

I think it's all about films, and probably that panels are made for both so making one aspect ratio of panel is cheaper. Arguably it is better for computing as well, as it allows 2 A4 ratioed sheets of paper to be displayed on screen at once.

Presumably the old 4:3 computer screen ratio was because video was in that ratio, so it's no surprise that when the ratio for video changes to ~ 16:9 screens do also.

Edited 2009-12-17 11:07 (UTC)

There are a number of reasons for monitors to be following TVs into the widescreen arena. One is that flat-panel displays don't have a big glass valve, the cathode ray tube to worry about. A CRT has to have a squarish aspect ratio (usually 4:3) as it is an evacuated glass vessel under pressure from the atmosphere. The wide flat bottle needed for a "widescreen" display would be more prone to cracking under that pressure and so it would need to be made from thicker glass and be a lot heavier. With flat-panels that's not a problem.

The factories making TV panels also make monitor panels and it's easy to repurpose a TV panel with a 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratio as a monitor; indeed some monitors are now coming with TV connections and even built-in DVD drives and tuners to act as occasional desktop TV sets. There's no reason to build large 4:3 flat-panel displays any more except for a few specialised customers. For the same convergence reasons nearly all 23" - 28" TFT displays have a screen resolution of 1920 x 1080 (16:9) or 1920 x 1200 (16:10) as that is capable of displaying standard 1080p HDTV images, the highest quality currently being broadcast or supplied on Blu-ray disc or streamed via broadband from network sources.

Widescreen displays are also preferable as they put more information in front of people without them having to look up and down all the time. Our eyes are designed to scan left and right with less effort than up-and-down. Try it -- if you keep your head still and look up you'll notice muscle movements lifting your eyebrows whereas your eyes can move left and right without the extra effort. Lions hiding in the savannah grass are more dangerous than drop-bears, basically. A 4:3 ratio 1600 x 1200 display on a CRT (what I'm looking at right now, oddly enough) is missing a 320 x 1200 vertical column of dataspace compared to a 1920 x 1200 16:10 TFT display, and if you give people screen area to play with they will use it up by keeping more windows open or maximising the ones they already have.

I have no need or requirement for home purposes, but some of the applications I'm using in the office definitely benefit from widescreen access as I can see more on my screen and don't have to keep scrolling horizontally, especially the detailed point and click and join the lines type stuff - i would suspect the closest easily available to anyone to see what I mean app woudl be Microsoft Access in a database view.

If you need to aks the question I suspect you're not using the apps I am(Actually i know you're not as otherwise you'd be sitting beside me or talking to me about work all the time) Email etc looks awful widescreen - you have to use windowed view or everything streeeeetches horrifically.

Makes me happy - I now have space for whatever document I'm working in in Adobe CS, and have the palettes off to one side, not covering my work.

I would love a widescreen monitor for work/play so I could more easily have windows next to one another to move between things.

Marketing crack, I reckon.

Mostly pointless, given all our reading is vertical.

@ Work its a definite plus because I can have several documents open for side to side comparison, work in multiple applications, copy and paste from one document to another.

@ Home, because I'm a gamer. With the 17" monitor I'm using at the moment I don't think I'm getting all I can out of my shiny new video card. The max resolution can only go so high and frankly I enjoy the bigger screen so I can get the most out of my card and games.

I'm no pro but that's why I love wide screens.

In VS2008, I can still have the solution editor on the side and the code doesn't wrap around.

But really, I'd guess NetFlix is behind it all.

For me, movies, and to have multiple windows open.

On top of the previous replies, a 20" screen in 4:3 ratio has about 8% more area than a 20" screen in 16:9 ratio.

So if the marginal manufacturing cost is closely related to area, but consumer choice and marketing efforts are even a little bit more biased towards the diagonal screen measurement, that would explain it. Lots of hypotheticals in there but it doesn't seem too unlikely...

My eyes are about 18cm from left-edge to right-edge, and about 2cm tall from top to bottom. So obviously the correct aspect ratio for displays is 9:1.

I remember arguing with someone in the early 90s about whether OHP slides - remember those? - should be portrait or landscape. I argued portrait, on line-length readability grounds, but they argued landscape, on the grounds that billions of TVs couldn't be wrong. They convinced me.

I have two 19 inch monitors at home and I love them so, but sometimes I wish I had one 24 inch monitor. Less screen space for programming but better for watching films and the like.

In a perfect world I'd like 2 24 inch monitors, though I can't decide if I'd want them side to side or stacked vertically. Maybe side to side but rotated 90 degrees for coding and just move one behind the other to watch films on the front one.

Can have the app running on the right, document open on the left. Woo.

Fit more on! I've had one for years. Couldn't afford big normal proportions I think...

My two reasons are for UI and for information. UI, when properly designed, can grow to use the space provided, and the more space there is, the more you have to work with. My World of Warcraft custom UI is much more efficient now that I'm in widescreen.

As for information, the only hindrance I find is in reading text. In terms of actual absorption of information, like video and images and surfing through a web page, the widescreen format does a much better job. And a much better job than the letter layout that an earlier monitor manufacturer tried.

I can't remember who, but someone released a monitor that was on a base that could let you twist the monitor, rotating it 90 degrees, in order to display full pages. It didn't make for a good workspace, in my opinion.

I think there might be something cognitive or psychological underlying the preference for widescreen. Given a choice, I prefer 16:9 over both 16:10 and 4:3.

One idea that comes to mind is that our eyes are side-by-side, giving us more horizontal viewing range.

I have a 30" Cinema display. Mostly because I thought I could afford it at the time, and I'm a huge cinema fan. I also tend to have at least 10+ apps open at any time and had a total bugger of a time keeping track of them with my old iMac [20"]

I know I don't *need* 30", but it is damned nice.

Some of the early monitors were 'portrait'. My friend

peterwright has one, though I have no idea if it's functional.

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Techwriter paradise...

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