Eight small widescreen monitors

Introduction

Widescreen is hot property. Not just TVs, but also an ever-growing amount of PC monitors is being released in this format. We've already established that this is particularly useful for larger monitors, but is that also the case for the relatively pint-sized 19 inch range where the amount of pixels is not exactly overwhelming?

Common or garden televisions and tube-based monitors have a height/width ratio of 4:3. The first TFT monitors followed that trend with resolutions ranging from 640x480 to 1024x768. When the size of these displays reached 17 and 19 inches, a curious move was made by the industry. These 1280x1024 pixeled monitors have a noticably more square ratio of 5:4. The difference between the height and the width of the screen was therefore decreased when compared to the traditional format.

Television sets have been making the transition to widescreen for years, and the screens in notebooks have made the step to wide quite a way back. The desktop monitor market has recently shifted to widescreen as well. First the larger 22 to 24 inch models started to show up in widescreen, and recently the popular 19 inch format has become available to consumers.

What's different with these monitors compared to widescreen TVs is that the precise aspect ratio is 16:10 as opposed to 16:9. This has to do with the fact that PCs pump out resolutions in multitudes of 8 pixels. This is not always favourable to the 16:9 format, and using 16:10 increases the chances of success. An example of this conundrum is finding the widescreen equivalent of the standard 1600x1200 pixels. With a height of 1200 pixels, the width would turn out to be 2133 1/3 pixels. Aside from the fact that there is no such thing as a third of a pixel, 2133 is not divisible by 8, and can therefore not be addressed by a videocard anyway. Using the 16:10 resolution gives a better result: we end up with 1920 pixels, a round number that's also divisible by eight. Another factor that speaks in favour of 16:10 is that it roughly corresponds to two pages of US Letter side by side, allowing for optimal displaying on a widescreen monitor.

Top: regular 19", bottom: widescreen 19"