Choosing monitor formats

A friend from work mentioned he was in the market for a new monitor at home. Seems his trusty old 17" CRT monitor finally bit the dust, and he was ready for a flat panel. "Should I get a regular one? Everything seems to be high-def these days - maybe I should get one of those, instead? But I don't watch movies, so I don't necessarily NEED widescreen."

His question belied some confusion about monitors, mixing-up the nomenclature of modern monitors pretty thoroughly.

First, let's address "high-def" and "widescreen."

High-definition is not necessarily the same as widescreen, although a lot of big widescreen plasma and LCD TVs on the market today are high-def. Hi-def has to do with the number of pixels it packs into the screen area. The more pixels it crams into a given space, the higher the definition.

For a standard home computer, PC or Windows, there's not really a "high definition" option for consumers per se - and if there were, you'd need a high-end video card to take advantage of it. Video professionals may work on truly high-def monitors, but you and I don't.

In the video world, high-def is high compared to, well, standard definition. Fewer rows of horizontal and vertical pixels. My Sony WEGA TV at home is a good old fashioned standard definition tube television. Discovery Channel still looks great, but not as great as it'd look on High Def. But there's not really that dichotomy for your computer.

Now, regardless of whether your TV or monitor is SD or HD, it will probably be one of two aspect ratios: 4:3 or 16:9.



The aspect ratio is the ratio of its longer dimension to its shorter dimension. A "standard," squarish looking tube TV set is a 4:3 aspect ratio - 4 units wide for every three units high.

Widescreen displays, on the other hand, are much wider than they are tall - hence, 16 units of width for 9 units of height. Make sense?

For TVs, whichever you choose depends on what kind of content you view. If you're a movie buff, go for 16x9 - but just make sure you purchase or rent widescreen-format movies. I won't get into all the ins and outs of widescreen, high-def TVs here - that's for Consumer Reports. And besides the original question was about a computer monitor.

So anyways, I find that THIS is the area where people usually need to really think over their monitor needs. Certainly, widescreen format monitors are more popular than ever. If you shop the Dell monitor store online, you'll see that it's frontloaded with widescreens. My criteria for a monitor goes like this: I work in a lot of timeline-based applications, which mean a lot of long horizontal windows. And I'm a multi-tasker as well, needing to view many apps simultaneously. So, I prefer widescreen so that I have less left-to-right scrolling and a wider area to work with.

You, however, may work primarily in 8.5x11 spreadsheets that require a lot of vertical scrolling - so maybe a 4:3 is appropriate. It's closer to the feel of your standard piece of paper when you're working with email, Word docs, or spreadsheets. If you're a "one simple Word file at a time user" and you open up a document on a widescreen display, you'll be looking at lots of empty whitespace all the time.

My feeling is that a lot of businesses probably go with 4:3 displays because they're cheaper, users don't watch movies on them, and they're perfect for simple Office applications, as described above. Or, maybe space is tight and displays must fit into a certain area, ruling out widescreens.

All that said, if you get a large enough widescreen, it will still be as tall as a good 4:3 with the benefit of more width. And, more width also means that you can have multiple documents open on the same screen, at the same time. Which means less toggling back and forth, or minimizing/maximizing to the Start Menu (Windows) or Hiding (Mac). The iMacs come to mind - they're widescreen, but big enough that the proportional "smaller" height is still better than what you'd get with a 19" 4:3 monitor.

Note that all of this applies to laptop displays as well. Many manufacturers are really pushing their widescreen models, but you can still get the standard aspect ratio screens as well.

The screen shot below shows the work area of my primary monitor, a 24" Dell widescreen. Note how I can have a web page and a word processing window fully open, side by side. It gives me 1920x1200 pixels (which technically, is 16:10 not 16:9). I use two widescreens like this, and it's pure computing nirvana!



Now that I look at the non-widescreen offerings on the Dell site, I see that, well, there just aren't many. There are a bunch of 19" and 17" monitors with 1280x724 resolutions (that "squarish" 4:3 look), but nothing bigger. My feeling is that there will always be a few out there, but for the most part they'll be phased out.

So, maybe by the time you're in the market again for a new monitor, the choice between 4:3 and widescreen will have been made much easier for you!