Often, when people hear widescreen, they think of it as being better, giving them more viewing space.
HOWEVER!
A 25" 4:3 "Regular" TV tends to look larger than a 32" 16:9 "Widescreen" TV. Why is this? Those devilish numbers are the diagonal measurement. They use this to confuse you. A 25" 4:3 TV is much taller than a 32" 16:9 TV, and in the end, it looks larger. To have a TV that feels at least as large, you'll need to get at least a 40", probably setting you back way more money than you'd like.
There are more reasons. Other than watching a movie, there is literally no advantage to a widescreen display. One might argue that a widescreen display offers more space on the left and right sides. However, more often than not, it is treated as instead cutting off space from the top and bottom, in terms of resolution. To cope with this, non-wide programming is either stretched, or is given those horrid black boxes you thought you had finally defeated by purchasing your TV.
Image!
IN CONCLUSION:
Widescreen is full of suck. Other than watching 16:9 movies, it poses no advantage; regular TV programming is stretched, it's low quality is exploited, and doesn't get any better. Non-wide video game systems are also stretched or boxed. They're overpriced!
Bare in mind in non-HD TV, both 16:9 and 4:3 are BOTH 720x576 resolution. Widescreen pixels are not square, they are rectangular. 16:9 does not have a higher resolution, and therefor has the same amount of data as a 4:3 image.
Also, 99% of TV is shot in 16:9 anyway, so it's best to have a 16:9 TV. The reason widescreen is better (or even the extreme widescreen you get in the cinema) is because the human eye sees widescreen. If you picture what youre seeing now as a TV image, its much, much wider than it is tall. To be honest i'd rather they made TVs that were cinema aspect ratio, but that will never happen.
What i don't understand is why people want widescreen computer monitors. My dad recently bought a massive 16:9 screen. It's mainly for his PS3 but its also for his computer. It just looks funny using the internet and stuff on widescreen. It can run at a nice 1920 by 1080 pixels though yummy on the PS3.
I dunno, 16:9 TV in the UK is pretty much just that. There's no zooming or cropping.
I think I've grown too acustomed to widescreen too. It's a pain going back to 4:3 TV and old games and having everything stretched now that all the displays I use are 16:9. 'Cept the DS.
Ah yes, i also run a nice 1280x1024 monitor, to me its the perfect resolution. It's 17" so the text by default appears a perfect size to read. Suprisingly though, its not 4:3 at all. It's 5:4 aspect ratio.
Although when computer monitors are widescreen, you DO get more data than 4:3. Unlike TVs, the pixels remain square instead of rectangle.
Originally Posted by Nick! Ah yes, i also run a nice 1280x1024 monitor, to me its the perfect resolution. It's 17" so the text by default appears a perfect size to read. Suprisingly though, its not 4:3 at all. It's 5:4 aspect ratio.
Although when computer monitors are widescreen, you DO get more data than 4:3. Unlike TVs, the pixels remain square instead of rectangle.
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Some games (Prey) have 16:9/10 options but are just 4:3 resolutions that fill the screen and just squashes more stuff in on the sides. Take a screenshot and you'll see!
My 1920x1200 monitor doesn't lose space over the 4:3 1600x1200 one (which I don't have anymore). All our TV has extra pixels on the side too, we don't get zooming.
Consumers use 4:3, I use 16:9 for production space. If you have a brain you can figure out the right size widescreen monitor you can use. About the TV quality, get used to it, I have mine stretched and I am very used to it plus the quality looks no different in 4:3 mode because the screen is too large for my cable's quality.
"Devilish measurements meant to confuse you"? -- come on, any idiot with an 8th grade education can tell you how televisions are measured. Lower slope = small y-side, larger x-side, and the same hypotenuse. Sure it might be a little smaller vertically, but if you consider that a same-sized TV would letterbox any movie you tried to play on it, you're viewable area is still going to be larger. And the solution to getting a natively wide-screen television image is to (get this) buy a high-def antenna or purchase digital cable, which you ought to be doing any since the only wide-screen TV's I've ever seen are high-definition. As for the game systems, most games on the $99 original Xbox are wide-screen and support at least 480p, and everything for the new systems will take full advantage of modern televisions.
On the computer side of things, there's plenty of reasons to want wide-screen. I have a 24", 1920x1200 monitor that I use. If you think of it in 1600x1200 4:3 terms, that gives me an extra 320 pixels of space on the side to cascade stuff like music players, instant messengers, and the like. It also lets me edit 1080p video, watch Blu-Ray movies if I choose to upgrade, and experience more immersion in games due to the aspect ratio being closer to that of natural human vision. Of course, since it sounds like you're probably running games off of a GeForce 2, and stuck in the N64 generation of consoles judging by your weak arguments against wide-screen displays, you probably can't appreciate this.
4:3 accounts for 74% of gamers playing Steam games. Out of the 1,414,244 people who took the survey.
So we widescreen is nowhere near the majority of computer gamer people yet. Wonder what the household % of widescreen TV users is?
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yummy on the PS3.
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