pet peeve about widescreen

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I seem to be one of the few people that is largely against widescreen resolution in its current form. As a graphics designer, I like to have lots of screen real estate, especially in the vertical direction. It's not that I don't like the concept of widescreen, in fact, I think it's a great concept to employ. However, most widescreen resolutions (except for the highest ones like 1920x1200 and 1680x1050) don't have at least 1000 lines of vertical resolution, which annoys me to no end. I can't even find a monitor that can display 1920x1200 for less than 300 dollars. Even worse are the television 16:9 resolutions, in which only 1080p (which translates to 1920x1080) would fit my bill, and televisions that can display that run into the thousands.

Instead, I got a 1400x1050 monitor, and it works quite nicely... a friend of mine who has a 1440x900 monitor actually said he liked it because it looked like his, but only taller...

So anyway, enough of the anecdotes. What I want to know is, why is widescreen so popular? What makes it so intrinsically "superior" to a non-widescreen resolution, even when the latter resolution has more pixels on it than the former?

I dunno myself. But I think widescreen is much nicer when you're watching movies rather than having black bars on the top and bottom.

I'm currently trying to find a new monitor myself. One with HDMI and that isn't too expensive... It's really hard to find one under $300.
I have an old 19' CRT right now.

Properly called pan-and-scan or full screen.

The wave and popularization of wide-screen is due to most blockbuster producers being unhappy that the far left/right sides are cut. It's a "pet peeves" for directors also, who want what they shot on camera to be shown on the final product as intended. With the exception of a few movies shot for fullscreen format, the pan-and-scan technique is supposedly taking away part of the viewing experience for the audience. Yet there's the problem of resolution. We know the further you move away from something, the less resolution. Full-screen is basically a zoom that allows for small details to be observed better. So it's all down to subjectivity.

- D

Last edited by Dracula on 21 Apr 2008, 9:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

For me it is an aesthetic proportion thing. Reformatting for fullscreen can cut things off of the sides. Not that much action is happening at the sides, but if the cinematography is good, the image is composed to be the most visually pleasing in the horizontality of the wide format. Just my opinion.

Z

Depends on the movie.

Absolutely! Since I rarely watch reformatted fullscreen, I don't pay that much attention to the possibility of missing the edge action.

Z

I love the widescreen on my macbook It lets me open two things side-by-side at once, and is great for movies and such...

I do get what you're saying though. With only 800 pixels vertical things get cramped. With the menubar, dock, and firefox address & status bars there's hardly any room at all for the page.

For the most part, if you move the dock to the left or right side of the screen it works better.

That whole vertical space thing is also what contributes to my using classic gui on my windows environments. Luna and Aero both have excessively large elements...

I do not like the cinema and thus think widescreen is a bad idea because it makes it worse to look at the entire screen easily! I have a generic crap 17' CRT, but I will not replace it until it malfunctions because the new monitors all use formats which were developped by drunk monkeys on crack (HDMI comes to mind)!

Edit: also an issue of widescreen monitors is that the colors are not the same on the entire screen since theses things are highly angle dependend.

Hm, also a Slashdot debacle. At the moment I don't mind having a wide screen. Though if I were, as stated on the article, doing more coding, I'd value the vertical space a lot more than the horizontal. Are we really so desperate as to cater computers to the droning entertainment seekers now? Yes. We have been for a decade. Oh well :/

Also, Lie, I like your name.

DVI isn't that bad of a connector, but if you really want to stick to a vga connector, there's some good LCD's being made even today that have VGA connectors...

And I will say again that LCD beats everything on a CRT... it's easier to look at and doesn't suffer from burn-ins... it also fits on your desk a whole lot more easily... the only downside is that you can't find a good LCD that gives you 1600x1200 like my old (we're talking 7 years old) CRT did...




Can you link to the article? I want to read it...

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl ... 21/1246222

It's more of an issue of not wanting to spend my good money for things with copy protection (HDMI).



Don't forget the latency of the things! It drives me nuts! CRTs don't that that issue. (Yes, I know what people say about it being so low that it doesn't show anymore, but it still shows), also I get an headache after staring into the fishtank LCDs at college for too long! You know, I like to move and then the colors change as well.

I only use full screen, but my father has a wide screen laptop which is nice, but only on a laptop for space reasons

movies , I have one built into my laptop. its nice

I really don't like widescreens on computers, they are a web designer's worst nightmare! Many of the sites I make look aweful on those widescreens.

I do not buy a computer to watch movies on, I use my TV for that. I watch YouTube on my computer, but that does not use widescreen.