The official 16:9 screen protest thread

I'd say 21:9 is next.

http://www.consumer.philips.com/c/cinema-21-9/30849/cat/gb/

Looks like me might be gaining width with 21:9, which isn't as bad as losing height.

 

Gaining width and losing height are the same thing, when you're just talking about an aspect ratio; it's all relative unless you have some other parameter which is kept constant, e.g. area or diagonal length.

 

120 pixels out of 1200 is a 10% change... how much of a change would you think it would make sense to complain about?

 

Actually, that change would be more noticeable than you think.

800 vertical pixles or 768 for me - they are worlds apart.
(My current 16:10 Vaio and my old 4:3 laptop that still works)

And that's what most people would get - 1376*768...

Besides the fact that 16:9 just looks plain ugly... (height width ratio of the notebook)

 

What are you talking about? 16:10 is the sweet spot in terms of full notebooks aesthetics, if the bezel isn't too tall. 4:3 looks too much like a brick, and way too tall when open, and 16:9 looks stupidly wide. My friend's Acer Aspire 5740 looks stupid, because it is too wide and not tall enough.

 

Ups - sorry - I made a mistake that I now corrected, 16:9 is ugly.

It is true that 16:10 looks nice - but only after you got used to it when you still owned and used a 4:3 laptop it looked odd.

God help us... I can't even look at the whole width of my 13,3" 16:10 screen without moving my eyes or turning my head...
(glasses don't help here - I'm near sighted)

 

i hated the change from 4:3 to 16:10, but now i love it, but i don't want 16:9 it's stupid!!!

 

I actually got used to 16:10 the moment I got my Vaio
Same with Vista

At least I gained pixels and space!

 

... but at a cost of physical height and overall screen area.

It's this reasoning that manufacturers are squeezing money out of you and lining their pockets. They've done it on the sly, and people like you have fallen for it.

The diagonal is longer (in 16:9), but the vertical height is made shorter, making those same 900 pixels smaller. You lose physical height, and area, even though you don't lose vertical pixels.

To show just how absurd your reasoning is, would you prefer your LCD to be 14" diagonal with the same 900 vertical pixels, but in this format:



The screen would measure 13.6" x 3.3". The resolution would be 3726 x 900.

But it's kept the 900 vertical pixels, so it should be good, right? Because it's still 14" and has gained horizontal pixels, and therefore more pixel real estate? Even though it's only 3.3" tall?

Exaggerated, but I hope you get the drift.

To illustrate the point further, the physical screen area of the above 14" LCD (ratio 4.2:1) would be 44.9 square inches. Whereas a 14" screen with a 16:10 ratio would be 88 square inches. That's where the manufacturers get their money. Less overall screen surface area for any given diagonal measurement. If they actually shipped the above 14" 3726 x 900 LCD compared to the normal 14" 1440 x 900 they'd be doubling their profit.

Making notebook screens wider serves little purpose for those who actually use a computer for computing. All I see is white space, a lack of height, and eye-squinting vertical image quality.

I wouldn't mind so much, but screen resolutions are increasing too, magnifying the illegibility further.

Then when you've got the Startbar/dock and menu bars sitting all along the bottom and top of the screen respectively, you lose even more usable, physical, vertical working height. And the startbar/menubars are a waste of horizontal pixel space, as they're mostly blank. So you lose your precious real estate further.

 

I have no problem with 16:9, my problem is 16:9 at 720P. I hate 768 height but 1366 width is nice. I have a 14" but 1600x900 would have been much nicer. My vision without glasses is 40/5 and 20/10 with them so small text is no real issue.

I have a 16:10 in my 1920x1200 P7805-u, text size is great but the 17" is just too big. While 1920 is nice 1200 is too tall and I rarely run apps full screen for this reason. at 1366x768 I almost always have to run full screen or at least at the full pixel height.

So in all 16:9 is fine but except on 11" notebooks get rid of the 720P standard. The 768 is too limiting and 900 would be welcome or run at 16:10 and 1366x854 as that would be much more livable too............

 

I prefer 16:10 but it's practically impossible to fight. The laptops with 16:10 tend to be significantly more expensive.

 

If my m6500 were to be 16:9 I would lose over an inch of vertical real estate on my laptop. I didn't think 120 pixels was a big deal until I hooked up my 16:9 external and saw how much 120 pixels really is.

To put it in some perspective that extra 120 pixels is almost the same area taken up by the ribbon in autocad 2010. If I were to use autocad on a 1080P screen My usable height for drawing would go from about 1080 pixels on 16:10 screen to about 960 pixels on a 16:9 screen. It is a pretty big deal, especially when one starts factoring in all the other widgets and bars taking up space on a screen.

 

This is not valid argument since your vertical loss is your horizontal gain.

In any event, there are NO sacred aspect ratios since they are all arbitrary and base of the movie/TV standard from which ALL monitors arose.

 

No, there's no horizontal gain, it's still the same number of pixels horizontally.

 

Horizontal gain... what is horizontal gain?

The fact that I need to turn my head from one side to the other to read stuff on fullscreen because else I need to scroll all the time?

Why are books higher than wide?

 

Most likely because some King said let it be so. As I've maintained from the start, there's nothing sacred about ratios here. At least no more so than someone driving on the "wrong" side of the road in Europe when compared to that of the American standard.

The fact is, humans hate change; and want to believe that anything that's different than what they're accustom to, is wrong!

 

@Kieran: Obviously, I wouldn't be a fan of extending the trend down to 3726x900 screens, because the physical size of the notebook would just be ridiculous. But, let's take the real-world example of the HP Elitebook 8440w (the new 16:9 model) versus the HP Elitebook 6930w (the old 16:10 model). Dimensions-wise, the 8440w grows 0.1" in width, but loses 0.2" in height from the 6930w, making for an overall (slightly) smaller machine.

True, you lose physical screen area, but you actually gain usable screen real estate - an increase in productivity, which is where most of the (valid) complaints of 16:9 screens lie. The DPI does increase from 120 to 130, so that may be a problem for those who have trouble with smaller text, but for those who do not, it's an overall gain.

Obviously, it's not as desirable as a higher-res 16:10 display option (which, unfortunately, does not exist past 1440x900 in 14" laptops), but at least to me, the increased screen resolution of 1600x900 screens is a plus in the 14" segment, regardless of the fact that we are getting less raw screen "area."

So that when you open them, they have two pages side by side (and I could make a parallel to high-res 16:9 screens being able to comfortably fit 2 applications/pages side by side)

This man speaks the truth!

 

Or because we read from top to bottom, line for line - and the width of a general page in a book is generally nicely covered by slightly moving your eyes while the height of the page keeps you from constantly turning pages.

On a computer - people who code read, webpages are built for height not width, so are office applications with all controls at the top - Photoshop has a lot at the side - but still has a top toolbar.

And about driving on the right/wrong side of the road - across continents it's difficult to argue. But doesn't the US drive on the right? Europe does - except this - "explosion" - island that drives on the wrong side of the road - and yes, the British do drive on the wrong side, because over 240 Million Europeans drive on the other side, compared to 60 Million brits - and that's just the European Union, not Continental Europe .

I suppose you have the two applications argument - and that's reasonably valid - but this often works on 16:10 too.
On the other hand though, if you really often need 2 applications, you're better off with two screens, no matter which aspect ratio you have.

 

With all due respect to everybody's opinion. I love my 16:9 screen. HD movies, videos looks so lovely in that. For apps, like web browsing or documents, I get space for other tools, gadgets. With a high resolution, I do not loose anything vertically.

 

I was partially joking in that statement - in fact, I'm working on a multipage Word document with 2 pages side-by-side at 97% on my WSXGA+ screen at the moment, and love it. I don't think I can ever go back to a screen that doesn't let me do that at somewhere close to 100% magnification.

As an addition to my previous post: regarding DPI, the 16:10 > 16:9 transition does help lower DPI to a more manageable level in 15" laptops. I chose a 1680x1050 screen in my T500 because I did not think I could handle a 1920x1200 screen in a 15.4" machine (DPI = 147). However, the new 1920x1080 screens in 15.6" machines such as the T510 and Envy 15 have a lower DPI of 141, which I find actually quite pleasing.

But maybe that's just because I'm getting more used to high-res screens

 

141 - how can you live with that? 113 on my Vaio was small for me when I got it, but I got used to it... (12870*800 on 16:10 on 13,3")

I suppose two word pages side by side... well that would work...

 

4:3 is a proportion made in Heaven. It is the ultimate aesthetic ratio. If anyone wants to read their documents 2 pages at once (how can they set eyes on two pages at once anyway?), buy two laptops and place them side by side.

 

I have no problem with this statement. In fact, I could not have said it better!

As am I!

 

Nah, 768 isn't less than 800, 900 isn't less than 1050, 1080 isn't less than 1200, half to 3/4 of an inch shorter isn't shorter.....nope, not losing anything if you squint your eyes and pretend it's what you always wanted.....I'm going to buy a 14" next because it's no different to 15.4" going by the apologists reckoning.

 

After going around and around in circles, I've come to the conclusion that it's more "realistic" to compare actual resolutions rather than the actual aspect ratio in itself.

For example, the whole "2 page argument" might be true for resolutions where the 16:9 res is wider than its 16:10 brethren(ex: 1280*800 vs 1366*768), but in some cases, the horizontal space is more or less the same in both(ex: 1920*1200 vs 1920*1080, or 1680*1050 vs 1600*900) so this argument fails with these resolutions.

 

Yeah, it makes little sense to just compare aspect ratios in a vacuum. For example, what if you were to take a laptop with a given screen height and 1440x900, keep the height the same, and widen it for 1600x900? Would that be a bad thing?

As Forever said, you have to look at real-world instances.

 

1920x1200vs 1920x1080 i only lose 120 pixels, or about 1 inch off my vertical screen space and gain nothing in return....so im not sure what you mean...

edit: regardless even if 1920 != 1920 and my screen got wider the fact that autocad's layout is top to bottom I lose my working space regardless of how much width I gained. Maybe if the ribbon and command line and tool boxes were stacked on the sides it'd be less of an issue and maybe welcomed but they're not.

 

it wouldn't be the same size screen and notebook then, a 16:9 18.4 compared to a 17" 16:10 is a perfect example, the two have identical screen heights.

 

Well the notebook size will change seeing as the diagonals vary(ex: 15.4" vs 15.6") but the resolution shouldn't affect the screen size.

 

You've lost me there, I was talking specifically about using the same physical screen height [as 16:10] and widening it to take more horizontal resolution [16:9] like I thought lackofcheese was talking about.

 

lackofcheese was talking about resolution height(in his last post). He was comparing a 1440*900 to a 1600*900 resolution.

 

I was considering a specific example where you widened the physical screen without changing the height, so yes, the screen would be larger. However, in the absence of real-world constraints, a larger screen is a good thing. It's pointless to simply discuss the aspect ratios without real-world constraints.

Taken by itself, the diagonal length of a screen is a meaningless measurement, so why should we compare a 17" 16:10 screen to a 17" 16:9?

For example, if we assume that the same screen area will mean the same weight, then we can say that 16:10 will provide around 5% more vertical height for the same level of weight. Unlike diagonal length, weight and screen area are much more meaningful quantities.

 

Well ironically for a same diagonal, a 16:9 should have lesser area than a 16:10. The farther away we get from a square, the less area we have. But in the laptop world, the diagonal slightly increases.

I agree that all this conversation should be brought in light of real world examples and constraints.

 

I'm a bit lost as to what you guys mean, 1440x900-1600x900 is going from 16:10 to 16:9 aspect, unless they're going to make screens with rectangular pixels you can't have that pixel match in a 16:10 aspect, thats why WSXGA was 1680x1050

 

The farther away we get from a circle, the less area we have (assuming that the maximum diagonal length remains a constant).

 

DPI should be what is used to compare screen resolutions because honestly, there's no other thing that translates from aspect ratio to aspect ratio.

Indeed, but circular laptops aren't yet a commodity compared to rectangular ones .

 

Indeed. It just helps to get the point across that the diagonal length isn't very meaningful, since a circular screen would be optimal in terms of screen area for a given diagonal, yet obviously not desirable.

 

Indeed, that's why I said it has to be translated into real world examples as we've both stated earlier.

I mean, to main resolutions affected by loss of vertical height with little to no gains in horizontal space are 1680*1050(transitioning to 1600*900 on most laptops) and 1920*1080(replaced by 1080p as the "high res" option on laptops).

 

I love 16:9

 

1920*1080 instead of 1920*1200 (clearly what you meant) is definitely a big loss, likely the biggest casualty of the transition to 16:9.

On the other hand, I think 1600*900 on 14" screens and 1920*1080 on 15.6" screens are good options and better than most previous offerings in laptops with similar size/weight.

 

That is definitely true, and a big downer for 17"+ laptops as well as people who like WUXGA screens on 15.4" laptops. However, the silver lining is that with the lower DPI of 15.6" 1920x1080 screens versus 15.4" 1920x1200 screens, 1920x1080 is now a much more common resolution in 15" laptops than 1920x1200 ever was, giving consumers seeking high-res screens more options.

 

Yeah I agree, the transition to higher resolutions on lower sized screens is a good thing, I wonder if they'd implement that 2500*1440(or whatever it was) on large sized laptops

 

2048*1152 and 2560*1440 are the next couple of steps up in 16:9 resolutions. Both would definitely not be amiss in larger laptops.

 

Well the higher the res, the more expensive it becomes and therefore the rarer it becomes. Even desktop monitors with such resolutions are a very small fraction compared to the 1920*1080 monitors around.

 

95 pages later and we haven't reached a conclusion. lol

I actually love my 1366x768 16" screen. My eyes are not really that good, so I don't mind it at all. I just wish though, the videos would play with no black bars.

 

Yeah, 1366*768 is a stupid resolution; it's not even exactly 16:9. 1360*765 or 1376*774 would've made more sense.

 

perhaps a vestigial vertical resolution going back to the days of 1024x768? Cheaper to bring out the old equipment than it is to make new stuff maybe?

 

True, and so 1366*768 with fixed aspect scaling is nice for running games that will only do 4:3.

 

Black bars honestly are due to the way the video/film is filmed. 16:9 somewhat fixes the issue, but doesn't remove them on lots of movies since they're not all filmed the same way and at the same resolution.

 

It's important, but not everything, physical size and height matters also, otherwise we wouldn't have different size screens to begin with.

A 4:3 14" with 1050 vertical is better for me, which is a similar physical height to a 16:10 15.4, I guess 900 high in a shorter 16:9 screen is similar pixel density, but it's still a loss of screen height, area and vertical resolution in the same size notebooks

Who cares if it's higher DPI, your still losing 120 pixel lines and screen area in the same size, if not bigger notebook, using smaller, higher DPI screens in the same size notebook is good if you like looking at screen bezels, there are a couple that are smaller, but they haven't shrunk the same amount as what the screen area has, and a large percentage have become bigger despite their smaller screen area, this is one of the things that annoys me the most.