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Widescreen woes
I was wondering if anyone else has noticed the quiet disappearance of traditional non-widescreen aspect ratio screens (1,024x758, 1,400x1,050 etc) from manufacturers laptop ranges?
I am beginning the process of looking for a replacement for my Dell D610. This has been one of the best laptops I have owned - it is well built, has a great balance of features and a fabulous screen (1,400x1,050). My wife has the newer version of the laptop the D620 - as you would expect it is faster, has more memory, larger hard disk etc. It also has a widescreen display; an improvement, you might think. However, rather than making the old screen wider, Dell have instead chopped off 150 pixels off the bottom to reduce its vertical resolution to 900 pixels. The effect is that the new model now has 14 per cent less screen acreage than the old model.
This may not seem much, but when you sit the two laptops side by side the difference is much more pronounced. By the time you take into account fixed screen overheads such as toolbars, window banners and page headers, the loss of usable space can be as much as 30 per cent. Comparing two identical word documents on each laptop the D610 shows 40 lines of text while the D620 can only manage 27 lines.
This does not seem like a positive step to me. To be fair to Dell, it is not alone in doing this - most laptop manufactures seem to have jumped on the widescreen bandwagon. But I do struggle to see how this loss of screen area makes the D620 an improvement on my old machine.
What I also find fascinating is that the manufacturers seem to have turned this apparently retrograde step into a positive sales feature. Widescreens are great if you watch a lot of movies. Most of us, however, use our laptops for email, word processing, and surfing the web, which basically involve scrolling down lines of text. In this respect, my old D610 beats the newer D620 hands down.
I am the only person who mourns the death of the old aspect ratio?
Jasper Warwick
I know what you mean - to an extent. If you take a screen with resolution of 1440x900 and compare it to a screen with resolution of 1400x1050, then you're going to feel - for most typing tasks - that it's better to have the 4:3 screen.
The main reason widescreen is pushed is for the movie element. So if you're strictly a business user, it won't be so important.
Consider two things:
(1) Widescreens are pushed because they allow you to view the screen more like you do in every day life - 2 eyes allow a panoramic view.
(2) Some wide-resolutions are desinged to just wide an existing standard. Case in point: most 24" ws monitors come in at 1920x1200, whereas a 20" 4:3 monitor comes in at 1600x1200.
Your point is interesting. Perhaps the manufacturers assume that EVERYONE wants a widescreen, when maybe only 90% do. There should be options for the 10%.
(Sorry if this a bit jumbled - didn't have time to organise it.)
Posted by MC | August 17, 2007 7:17 PM
Jasper I totally agree with you. In fact I only came across this posting by googling non-widescreen laptop. I work with graphics, primarily photos and the vertical component of a widescreen is too small to work with. Frankly I feel that more people would prefer the 4:3 ratio. Writers, photographers, surfers etc etc must be a huge part of notebook users. Today it took at least twenty minutes talking to a dell sales person trying to find the horizontal and vertical measurements of 17" screen. He could not understand this request and ended by saying it was about 14" x 14.5" complete rubbish! Dell need to use better english speakers, I hate talking to their sales or customer care.
So what do we do, those of us who want to work on our laptops rather than watch movies?
Ron Cavedaschi
Posted by Ron Cavedaschi | October 9, 2007 5:29 PM
widescreens are horrible for CAD users - e.g. true circles are strectched to ellipses and everything else is stretched horizontally, very bad visual environment to work in ...
manufacturers unfortunately follow trends ...
Posted by hans | October 20, 2007 5:29 PM
The Dell Latitude D520 (you have to go to small business section when you go to Dell's site to see this model) is the traditional 4:3 aspect ratio. It is also on sale for $599-$749. I prefer non-widescreen because all of my digital photos are 4:3 and I don't want them displayed with black bars on either side when I view them. Also, Word documents are vertical, so I want to be able to see more vertical space. Although I'd rather wait another 6 months or so to buy a laptop, I am worried that if I wait, there won't be any 4:3 available (plus I want XP not Vista - the D520 offers that).
Posted by Cathy | October 30, 2007 7:13 PM