Below is a blog entry from my Yahoo 360 account, originally written December 25, 2007.  Tonight my dad got excited about seeing a cheap 17″ widescreen LCD monitor in an advertisement.  I then told him why such a “small” widescreen monitor is bad.  I’ll share my opinion and analysis here on WordPress.

From the geognerd archives:

Remember back in the 90s when Pontiac was advertising its Widetrack Pontiac Grand Prix? They’d say in the commercial “Wider is better.” Well, it looks like people have drunk the Kool Aid when it comes to flat panel displays. I took a look at LCD monitors and TVs at TigerDirect a couple of days ago.

First, let’s talk about the TVs. When I was at Tiger in Naperville several weeks ago, I noticed that the big-screen flat panel TVs didn’t jive with my sense of what is a big screen. The 42″ TVs didn’t look that big to me. When I worked at Ward’s, I thought the 36″ TVs we sold were huge. Those were 4:3 screen ratio CRTs. My problem with the 42″ flat panel I saw was that it wasn’t very tall vertically. Most, if not all flat panel HDTVs are widescreen 16:9 ratio. TV screens are measured diagonally. Since these are widescreen TVs, you have a long horizontal, which means you don’t necessarily need a big vertical to get a big diagonal measurement. The widescreen means the hypotenuse, the diagonal measurement, has more space to cover horizontally. The diagonal has more run than rise.

Hope that all made sense. Where am I going with this? I like my TVs to have a lot of “vertical” to their picture. Widescreen TVs don’t look that big to me. The picture is squinty. Stuff that is wide doesn’t look as big to me as stuff that is tall. During my visit to Tiger in Hoffman Estates, I looked at another 42″ widescreen flat panel HDTV. Standing in front of it, I realised that its screen is only about as tall as the 27″ CRT 4:3 screen we have in our living room. So if I bought a 42″ widescreen, the picture to me would be no bigger than that on my 27″. Sure, I’d have more horizontal coverage, but what good is it if the vertical coverage hasn’t increased? For me, the only acceptable big screen widescreen TVs were like 52″ or something. Isn’t that ridiculous? When I heard about people at work getting 42″ flat panels, I thought “Damn, those are big TVs.” Well, turns out they are no bigger than my 27″ tube TV.

Seriously, next time you go to an electronics store, compare a 4:3 display with a 16:9 display. You will see that a 42″ widescreen isn’t as big as a 42″ standard display. At least that’s how it looks to me. I just tried some back-of-envelope math (literally, couldn’t find real paper) but I’m making mistakes since it’s after midnight. I’ll come back with some math later. I want to know if a 16:9 42″ TV actually has less screen area than a 42″ 4:3 TV.

Speaking of comparisons, I then went to look at LCD monitors. There was a 17″ Viewsonic 16:10 (not a typo) widescreen. I would shoot myself if I had to use that thing every day. The 17″ were spread across the horizontal of the monitor, leaving next to nothing for the vertical. This 17″ had the vertical height of maybe a 14″ monitor. How useless. They haven’t sold 14″ displays for years because they are too small! The tinyness of the 17″ widescreen became readily apparent when compared with the standard 17″ display right next to it. The width of the widescreen was spiffy but it was so short as to be useless. I started looking at other monitors to see how big one would have to go before a widescreen became usable for computing. I found that at 19″ a widescreen had enough vertical height to be usable, but you really needed a 22″ for there to be adequate vertical height for maximum efficiency while working. Jeez, you know how freaking huge a 22″ is when paired with a 4:3 aspect ratio?

I hope display manufacturers continue to produce 4:3 displays. I know I’m losing the battle with CRTs. Monitors are near impossible to find but CRT TVs can still be had at lower-end retailers. I should peruse some retailer websites to see if you can still get CRT TVs. Anyway, I’ve acknowledged that I may eventually have to buy an LCD monitor or TV even though they don’t last anywhere near as long as CRTs, cost more upfront, and take 30 years to save you enough electricity to recover the higher upfront cost. The 16:9 displays are ridiculous. I think it’s a ploy to get you to buy a bigger display panel. Like I said, a 42″ would be plenty for me in 4:3 ratio. But not at 16:9, which means I would have to pony up the extra bucks for a 55″. The display manufacturers are giving us less display for our money, so we have to pay more to get what we want. I never thought I would be facing the day when it would be so damned hard to find a 4:3 CRT TV and monitor. We’re all getting these crappy 16:9 LCDs forced on us, and the majority of consumers are just going along with it because the marketers have deluded them into thinking wider is better.

Postscript: I just found monitor specs. For that funky widescreen Viewsonic, it says the screen is 14.4″ by 9.0″. This 17″ Acer, which looked decent to me, has a screen area of 13.3″ by 10.6″. Let’s do the math. The funky widescreen 17″ Viewsonic has a screen area of 129.6 square inches versus the normal 17″ Acer’s 143.64 square inches. Aha! Do I get a Nobel Prize for this? I have demonstrated that with a widescreen you get 9.77% less screen area. I am pleased to proclaim that widescreens officially SUCK.