Notebook displays- we give up more than we think with widescreen formats
I remember when HDTVs started spreading like wildfire how enamored we were at the widescreen format. This 16:9 format mimicked what we see in the movie theaters and we were enthralled at having that experience in our homes. About the time that these TVs were gaining in popularity we saw the 16:9 format begin to appear on our notebook screens. It started slowly enough then rapidly picked up pace until it seems that most notebooks today come with the wide screens that mimic our TVs.
The adoption of the 16:9 format for notebooks means the screen is shorter in the up/down direction than the older 16:10 format of yesteryear. This means that notebooks can be shorter overall and this can improve the portability of them. What PC Magazine has reported in an article is that we may be surprised how much screen real estate we lose with the wide screen format. While shorter TVs don’t impact their usability the same is not true of notebooks since the screen gets shorter when the wide screen format is used and that’s the main direction we use for document and web work. They took a ruler to notebook screens to determine how much we are losing in that screen direction and they were surprised how much.
What is interesting is their discussion with screen makers who are totally switching to the 16:9 format next year. They don’t anticipate making very many of the older, taller screens. Are they doing it because this is better for the end users? Of course not, shorter screens are cheaper to make and that’s where we’re going with this. Shorter screens also use less power which is good for battery life but since most applications are written for top-down data consumption are we losing too much?
16:9, 16:10, 15:9 are all the current widescreen formats. 4:3 was the format of “yesteryear”.
i dont believe the myth we are losing real estate, we are just gaining extra horizontal width. just take a look at 1 example like XGA 1024 x 768 going to WXGA 1276 x 768.
just because the screens are physically smaller doesnt mean we are losing pixels.
James I have had a “square” Dell LCD for a number of years and like the format a lot for my work. I drive it from a HP 14″ wide format laptop which is good for movies, etc., but not spreadsheets and other documents.
My employer gave me a ThinkPad T43 (heavy-noisy) but it has a “square” 15″ screen (and great keyboard) that works very well for side-by-side documents, PDFs, etc. I had a friend over a couple of weeks ago who has a X61 laptop with the 12″ square screen and I found it very easy to work with on a desktop or my lap in Starbucks.
My Dad has a 21″ HP LCD at home that he tethers to his laptop, and I don not like the “squished” format.
Maybe if PC Magazine devoted more time to following Tablet PC happenings, their “revelation” wouldn’t be two years behind. Ever since widescreens started showing up more frequently a couple years back, I’ve had plenty of discussions with tableteers comparing widescreen to legal pads and standard to letter. No one cares more about screen space than folks who work directly on the screen.
I love my 14″ widescreen (and if you look back, you’ll notice I consistently point out it’s widescreen). Great for my horizontal work style, which includes inking across the full width. Right side’s open for tools, like the ritePen toolbar and Inkseine’s floating tool ring. And when I need vertical space, I flip to portrait. Isn’t it nice to not bound by the trappings of a standard notebook?
Screen is a matter of personal preference and PC Mag is not saying we lose any pixels. They are correct in pointing out that for those who work in the up/down direction like with long documents you do lose quite a bit. Me, I like both format screens depending on what I’m doing. The widescreen format makes possible a smaller notebook and I’m all for that.
My wife’s Dell Latitude D620 is 1440 x 900. My Dell Latitude D600 is 1400 x 1050. Both in theory have a 14.x” screen, although the D620 is widescreen. There are significantly more pixels in my old 4×3 screen than in my wife’s 16×10 screen.
My MacBook is 1280×800. This screen height is so short, I ended up with the Dock on the left hand edge of the screen.
im all for a universal standard, todays 16:9 laptops have plenty of up/down pixels. Im for one glad that all my movies are played back on a “movie Ratio” Screen. Office work is fine, Games are perfect and movies are amazing on the 16:9 ratio. I agree it must be cheaper for manufacturers to stick to one ratio on all products.
Just put your taskbar on the side. More room vertically, and easier to switch tasks on a tablet. easy.
The wider screens allow for more browser width so you don’t have to scroll left and right all the time. It seems like web pages are standardizing on a size to fit a wide screen display better.
Relative pixel count needs to be considered when comparing one format to another. WXGA (1280×768) compares favorably to XGA (1024×768), but unfavorably to SVGA (1280×1024). Whether widescreen is “better” or “offers more room” depends on the relative point of comparison. If vertical pixel count is the same in two different displays, widescreen offers an advantage.
You aren’t necessarily losing pixels, but you are losing overall area.
A 15″ monitor with the 4:3 ratio will have more overall area than a 15″ 16:9 ratio. However, more area does not mean more pixels, it’s all about the resolution baby.
1024×768 = 786432 (4:3)
1280×720 = 921600 (16:9)
And there are many many more resolutions out there (some of them not fitting those ratios perfectly). If you want to know how many pixels you’ve got, multiply out your resolution.
I have a nice VESA mount for my 16×10 Dell display. In the same way that we “lose real estate” by going wide we could “gain real estate” by rotating the screen 90 degrees no? Of course you can’t really do this too easily with a normal laptop.
@Ryan: Back when I was heavily using my T40p, I experimented with putting the laptop on its side, roatating the screen, and using a wireless keyboard and mouse. It actually worked pretty well, except for the small annoyance when I hooked up a printer to the side-mounted USB ports. Ended up with a cable sticking straight up pretty close to the screen, which was distracting.
Did get a lot of stares, though.
I don’t think we’re “giving up” anything. Widescreens have made 17″ laptops viable, giving you WUXGA resolution, keyboards with numpads, full 1080p movie playback, spreadsheet cells galore, and fit two documents at 100% side-by-side. It’s become the no-compromise platform for many power users. 16:9 gives you a far better use of that screen real estate, allowing for more room on your taskbar, open more tabs, and multitask work easier.
And it’s the same argument for 30″ displays – fit more on screen.
17″ laptop in 4:9? Good luck carrying it around.
I prefer the wide screen layout, I just wish higher resolution in general was the norm.
My laptop is 1280×768. My desktop primary monitor is 1600×1050 and secondary monitor is 1280×1024.
I’m frustrated all the time by web sites that do slide shows and only the top half of each slide shows up on the screen of my laptop. A lot of the time, by the time I’ve scrolled the page so I can see the entire slide, it auto-refreshes to the next slide.
I don’t want a netbook that has a screen that isn’t even as high resolution as the one I’ve got.
Let’s stop talking about megapixels in cameras, and start talking about them, along with _vertical_ dimensions, in laptops. Repeat after me:
“I want a 1 megapixel screet 8 inches high.”