Rant! There was a kvetch a few weeks ago about widescreen monitors. Today I went shopping for normal 4:3 aspect ratio monitors, and couldn't find any. It seems that the so-called widescreen monitors have displaced nearly all the squarer monitors.
There is something insideous happening, and the scary thing is that the customers are pulling from their end. Monitors are measured by the diagonal dimension. a 4:3 20inch monitor is 16 inches wide and 12 inches high - more or less, usually less. For those of us using web browsers and text editors and similar tools, we are usually looking at portrait format pages, taller than wide. So an 8.5 x 11 image, displayed on a 21 inch monitor, only fills half the screen. Panels and status bars, running horizontally (and why the heck is that, anyway???), cut down the size of displayed pages even more. Now we have the abomination of "widescreen", or as I choose to call them, RUNT monitors. The aspect ratios are approximately 16:9 . Wider, oooo! More pixels, more workspace, right? Wrong. Monitors are still measured by the diagonal. An honest 4:3 20 inch monitor has 16x12 or 192 square inches of pixels (less usually, because many "20 inch" screens are a little over 19.5 inches between the pixel corners). The math is harder to do for 16:9 ratio, but an honest 20 inch diagonal 16:9 is 17.432 inches wide ( 8.9% wider ) and 9.805 inches tall (18.3% shorter). The pixel area is 170.92 square inches, 11% smaller. To get the same pixel area, you need a 6% larger diagonal - that is, a more expensive monitor. To get 12 vertical inches (11 inch page plus panels and status bars), a 16:9 screen must be 21.3 inches wide, or 24.5 inch diagonal. Oh well, get rid of a few books in the shelf, and the picture of the family. Since you are paying big bucks for a "25 inch" rather than a "20 inch" screen, you can't afford a family anyway. But then, an increasing number of people are using their computers as TVs or game platforms (the same as TV, but with repetitive stress injury and 3-5 times the wasted electricity). We are all unemployed - who needs to do use computers for work any more? So the fact that the new monitors are less useful for programming, writing, and other productive tasks is actually a bonus. The manufacturers reduce cost. The consumers reduce mental effort. Only us dinosaurs who actually use our computers to create stuff are complaining. Fooey. A pox on both their houses, to the seventh generation! Keith P.S. Actually, I suppose the trick is to mount the monitor with the screen rotated 90 degrees, then use Option "Rotate" "CW" in the X configuration. Is there a list of video cards that support this option? It is a little hard on most laptop users ... -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
