Widescreen laptops

[Luke-H]

I personally love it, it's great for schoolwork. You can get a word document, MSN, iTunes and a web browser on one screen. Perfect!

[Sput]

They're also brilliant for that all-important multi-window porn wank.

[Pete]

Nothing to do with James Martin, whoever and whatever he is, seeing as I've never really experienced him.

lucky you.

[Dr Lobster*]

i think most websites which adjust their width depending on the size of the browser window do sometimes look a bit strange on a widescreen - tv forum and metropol both have quite a lot of wasted space when - the alternative i guess is like the bbc news website where its completely crammed in the corner. i'm not sure which i prefer.

a widescreen monitor is good for software development - i used to run two screens but in the end i just got a bigger, wide monitor. you can see from this screenshot here how delphi (and microsoft visual studio looks much like this too) looks and takes up a lot of screen space.

http://www.gorillaenterprises.co.uk/upl ... enshot.jpg

[cdd]

But then I'd argue that TVs shouldn't be widescreen either, although that's a whole other rant.

Well as long as films etc are produced in Widescreen formats, there will be demand for wide-screen TVs and, as laptops become media centers, wide-screen laptops.

Am I right in saying the only reason why films are shot in wide-screen is because they are shot for cinema?

[cwathen]

Well as long as films etc are produced in Widescreen formats, there will be demand for wide-screen TVs and, as laptops become media centers, wide-screen laptops.

I think you missed the point there. I continue to stand by my (often made) viewpoint that there was no reason to ever move away from 4:3 TV, but the point I was making was that it's somewhat odd that we went for 16:9 as a widescreen TV format when no films are made in 16:9, then went for 16:10 as a widescreen format for laptops when no TVs are 16:10.

Am I right in saying the only reason why films are shot in wide-screen is because they are shot for cinema?

This isn't TV Forum, so I won't lament it too much, but have you ever wondered where widescreen came from? Until the 1950's films had no standard aspect ratio (indeed; they still don't now), but were generally made in what for lack of a better term is best described as a '4:3 like' format.

TVs started to encroach on the cinema's marketplace and before developments like stereo (and then surround) sound, the most obvious thing they could do for the time being was to offer a bigger picture. Within a fairly short time, it became impossible to preserve the original aspect ratio of the projection screen which made it necessary to scale up in one direction only - sideways, which led to widescreen.

People can argue as much as they care to about 'golden ratios' and 'more natural fields of vision' - widescreen was and is a marketing gimmick, firstly to continue to deliver larger cinema screens when they couldn't get any taller, and more recently to force everyone to change their TV. The fact that no major nation has ever succesfully sold widescreen TV off it's own back (the Americans tacked it to HDTV, we British tacked it to digital) is very telling.

It's rather odd that many people today will chastise 'backwards' people for owning 'square' 4:3 sets since 4:3 was eventually finalised as an ideal aspect ratio for TVs, whilst 16:9 widescreen has never been anything more than a compromise between standard cinema widescreen (2.35:1) and delivering TVs of a practical size.

16:9 is more of an ill-fitting cludge than 4:3 ever was.