Eight small widescreen monitors

Hype

Whatever the case may be, widescreen monitors have a 16:10 ratio, and that's significantly wider than the 5:4 ratio that we're used to from 17 and 19 inch monitors. If two screens have an equal diagonal, the widescreen is much less tall, but a lot wider. Traditional 19 inch models have a 1280x1024 resolution, but in widescreen format, 19 inch translates to 1440 by 900 pixels. The total amount of pixels is slightly less with a widescreen than a regular monitor: 1,296,000 compared to 1,300,720 pixels. A widescreen monitor therefore does not have a larger surface area than a conventional model. Even though the 19 inch widescreen models are selling like hotcakes, there doesn't seem to be any credible advantage over the old format. In theory it should be possible to display two pages of text side by side, but considering the low resolution that's used by these 19 inch monitors it's not a suitable solution. With standard applications like surfing the web or word processing, a wide aspect ratio has no advantage. The regular width of 1280 pixels is more than enough for almost every website, and because widescreen monitors are less tall, more scrolling is needed to navigate.

Only in the field of gaming can 19 inch monitors show their pros. More and more games are offering support for widescreen resolutions, and in most circumstances it's more pleasant to have more information width-wise than height-wise. For regular office work, we can not recommend 19 inch widescreen monitors above the standard 19 inch models, especially if you already own a conventional 17 or 19 inch LCD monitor.

Testing

For this comparatative review we used a wide range of the currently available 19 inch widescreen crop, ranging in price from 209 to 399 euros. In all cases, we encountered TN TFT panels, with a resolution of 1440x900 pixels. All monitors have a manufacturer's specification of 300 Candella per square meter, and the contrast ranges from 500:1 to 850:1. In all cases, we are dealing with "fast" monitors with response times ranging between 2 and 8 ms. It should be noted that half of the monitors is equipped only with a D-Sub (VGA) connection, and that DVI is absent in these cases. None of the monitors is suitable for use in a portrait layout, and just one model has a USB hub on board. All in all, we can safely say that most manufacturers opted for a low-cost approach and therefore saved on functionality. This shouldn't necessarily be a drawback. It means that, for a relatively low price, you get a decent monitor. If you want more functionality and you have a bigger budget, you'd end up looking at larger screen sizes.