LCD sizes controlled by flat glass vendors

I use a 16:10 LCD TFT monitor daily and am very pleased with the results (It's a Japanese FUJITSU). Its really better for your eyes. 

But, I cannot understand why some applications or games do not support widescreen resolutions??? 

Maybe now everything will work out well!

Considering the majority of people are buying Blu-Ray hardware, the PS3 mainly and movies on BD outsell HD-DVD by a factor over 3:1 .. it's hard to imagine that HD-DVD is deciding the aspect ratio of modern HDTV panels. 

Anyway.. 16:9 LCD and Plasma exist since quite same years ago now. 

Toshiba/Microsoft/DVD-Forum with their HD-DVD are not deciding the aspect ratio of modern displays and that's for sure.

They will probably bring them back one day as a new 'feature' with a premium price.

Lower production costs, films that 'appear' to fill the screen, console ports that don't have to be redone for 16:10...

Everyone wins except the consumer, but what's new?

The problem with this is that most of the new movies coming out in High Def, whether it be HD-DVD or Blu-ray - don't use 16:9 (1.85:1). 

They use 2.35:1 ratio. Leaving some nice black bars at the top and bottom of your "futureproof" 16:9 TV. With all that high definition DRM and things, its extremely difficult if not impossible to stretch the image to fill the bars, or crop out the edges in a zoom fasion. 

If some tvs were released as 2.35:1 just for these movies, they'd sell. Then again, they'd be almost useless for standard 4:3 viewing.

Am I the only one that finds the extreme lack of 4:3 / 5:4 monitors a pain the the posterior?

I run 2x 17" TFTs at home and want to upgrade. I want to give some monitor company my money. But i'll only do it for a reasonable price and for a higher resolution - There are 0 decently priced monitors available with a resolution > 1280x1024. If anyone has evidence to the contrary please let me know.

By the way, 2x Widescreen monitors just doesnt look right.

2.35:1 ratio TVs? Get Real. Most people don't have a clue about aspect radios as it is, all they care is will it fit the screen, i.e. no black bars. 16:9 is the standard for TV programmes these days, so a 16:9 TV is better for those broadcasts. Those who care could get a projector or a bigger TV.
2.35:1 is a specialist ratio, not all directors like this ratio as it is. Most choose the ratio that best suits the meterial they're shooting, and there are many aspect ratios out there.

its not the fixed ratio that kills me, its the fixed DPI. we've had 15.4 1920x1200 laptops for ages but there is only a single 1080p desktop lcd out there under 24 inches: thats proper fscked.

and we can point the blame 100% at microsoft, for window's total inability to do anything with higher DPI besides scale your content smaller.

Common, do the math. Compare panels of the same width and same dot pitch, but at 16:12 (=4:3), 16:10 and 16:9.
Now guess what is cheaper to produce the same diagonal.

@Joerg

I'm fairly sure that the article writer meant to put "HD content and HD players".

You could have easily read this into the context of the sentence... it wasn't a dig a either HD DVD or Blu Ray.

:)

Ironically, I'd been ranting about this only yesterday. 16:9 is a pain.

Very few 16:9 resolutions break down into conveniently large power-of-two tiles which are friendly to graphics cards, rendering algorithms, and image compression; even 1920x1080 doesn't divide by 16 vertically, which is why a lot of frame grabs end up as 1920x1088 with a line of junk along the bottom. 1366x768 is neither 16:9 (exactly) nor does it divide by anything much (1366=2x683, and 683 is prime) which is algorithmically annoying; it was foisted on us by the display industry solely because keeping a 768 vertical resolution was convenient to them, in spite of it making a pig's ear of HD resolutions and annoying everyone else. Padding an arbitrary 16:9 resolution to tile boundaries complicates algorithms and wastes memory and bandwidth.

16:9 on a laptop reduces the amount of screen area you get for the amount of lap space it takes up. Widescreen might be justified in terms of being able to fit in a bag, but 16:10 is perfectly adequate. On the desktop, the same applies (you just waste real-estate above the desk). Two 16x10 panels rotated give you a 5x4 total; two 16x9 panels rotated give you 9x8, which is just weird.

16:9 in a television makes sense, albeit only because that's the aspect ratio of the content (it was a bad idea in the first place, but that horse has long bolted). Home cinema systems have dedicated controls and separate displays for the interface. Computers use a general-purpose keyboard and mouse (usually), and rely on the screen for output; having 10% of the screen set aside so that every minor tweak doesn't blot out some of the display is a trade-off I'd be prepared to make.

I'll bet 16x9 is achieved by chopping pixels off the available resolutions, rather than adding them, too. I'd object far less to the new WUXGA being 2134x1200 rather than 1920x1080, but since the industry seems determined to move to bigger pixels and lower resolutions, I'm not holding my breath.

16x10 is well-established. It's highly unlikely that the change from a 16x9 console title to a 16x10 PC desktop takes significant development effort - it can always run letterboxed, if it comes down to it. Moving PCs to 16x9 won't remove the continuing need to support legacy 16x10 (and 5x4, and 4x3) displays, but it means that those apps which are expecting at least a certain number of vertical pixels are going to struggle. Since most desktop applications have menus across the top, window furniture above and below, and the desktop task bar across the bottom of the screen (yes, I know you can move it), vertical real-estate is at far more of a premium than is horizontal.

I don't want the display industry foisting DisplayPort on me, but at least I can probably ignore that, other than taking a hit in my wallet (I remain confident that it'll go away). 16:9 computer screens will impact me more. I wonder how one can object?

TV sets are 16:9 while computer monitors are 16:10. But now, some smaller 19 and 20 inch TV sets are appearing that are using 16:10 monitor panels, and even the 1680x1050 pixels of 16:10 monitors, all this for cost reasons.

What are TV makers doing to fit the 16:9 HDTV signal on their 16:10 screens? No magic is possible. They can crop the sides or squish the picture horizontally, or do a nice mix of the two...


I never understood the reason behind 16:10 or where it came from. I've read that 16:9 was chosen for HD content because it perfectly handled all existing aspect ratios in use by film and tv production, so it made sense, plus widescreen is more natural than 4:3. So from my perspective (and I am computer guy not an AV guy) 16:9 has always made sense, and 16:10 was the oddball. Computers and Consumer Electronics are converging and therefore need to match up, so 16x9 is fine by me, but I want to see higher resolutions, and software that locks the resolution to the native resolution of the panel, and just makes your desktop look bigger or smaller as the user wants then I wouldn't be stuck fixing people's computers where they made the image all fuzzy by running 800x600 on a 1280x1024 screen, thats painful on the eyes.

One thing I loved in the good old Mac II days was working on portrait monitors. My shiny new 1280x800 screen laptop is lovely for watching telly on ... but for reading web pages, writing stuff or making stuff, 800x1280 would be vastly superior (even if the laptop would look more than a little silly). Where's the tilt-and-swivel 9:16 monitors, that's what I want to know. Or a tablet PC that doesn't cost a fortune as well as sucking.

Just an idea, but wouldn't the customers buying habits be a little more influencing to which aspect size the "glass" will be cut? I mean, what does a share holder of a company really care about? -> making money. Where does that money come from? -> the customers wallets. So if the customer insists on buying more 16:9 monitors than 4:3 monitors, I think the LCD manufacturers are going to head in that direction and buy the size of glass their customers want - NOT the size of glass the glass manufacturers want to sell them. It's a bonus for the LCD manufacturers that the area of glass is smaller for the 16:9 aspect, but I highly doubt that it's the Glass manufacturers that are driving this train wreck in that direction.

Selling Stats from the Dec 2007 MarketNews (Canadian magazine for businesses) has the following data on pg 54:

Q4 2007 Units
17" 4:3 120,000
19" 4:3 109,000
19" widescreen 216,000
22" widescreen 164,000
27" widescreen 2,400
32" widescreen 1,360

Looks to me like the customers buying habits are telling the story here.

it will come down to what people are willing to buy. will people care if their display is 16:9 or 16:10 if one is "X" euros or dollars or RMB cheaper? 

businesses do care, they want a standard. if the LCD panel boys say 16:9 will be the future standard, well, that's what is going to be sold. businesses are just starting to look at 16:10, most stuff is still 4:3 (although notebook PCs are almost all 16:10 now). i don't think there's legacy apps written for 16:10, so the move to 16:9 isn't such a big deal.

compare the current standard display sizes that are 16:10 with the corresponding 16:9 size and see if it really makes a difference or not to the user