Why Computer Monitors and HD TVs are Now Using Widescreen Format?

Today our personal computer is more than just an office digital typewriter to do simple computation jobs like write text document using Microsoft Word or spreadsheet using Excel. It evolving into multimedia center providing almost all graphics functions you'd never imagine before: complex image and movie editing, playing 3D games and high-definition movie, rendering 3D animation, cloud computing, streaming video, satellite sightseeing using Google Earth, and many more.

Since PC evolve into multimedia center, it need proper display device. Many display manufacturers have practically abandoned the long time standard 4:3 format, instead opting to manufacture LCD widescreen 16:10 models. The reason of using widescreen LCD monitor is because widescreen format high-definition video (using 16:9 aspect ratio) requires a widescreen monitor so it can be displayed properly.

Why high definition video using 16:9 widescreen format instead of more common, 4:3 format? Kerns H. Powers, scientist and initiator of 16:9 widescreen format, discovered a fact that all other popular aspects when normalized to constant area would fit within an outer rectangle and when over-lapped, all shared a common inner rectangle. The aspect ratio of these rectangles is simply the geometric mean which is coincidentally close to 16:9.

While 16:9 was selected as a compromise format, the popularity of HDTV broadcast has solidified 16:9 as the most important video aspect ratio for the future. 16:9 widescreen standard also used in most current personal video cameras and being one of three ratios specified for MPEG-2 video compression. Now, easy to understand why YouTube, the biggest video sharing service on the net, adopting widescreen format as their default video player format since November 24, 2008.

Using widescreen LCD monitor or TVs as a display device is far better than readjusting the original, widescreen version of HD movie using Pan and scan. Pan and scan is one method of adjusting widescreen film images (16:9) so that they can be shown within the proportions of a standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio TV screen. Pan and scan often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image (the technique may crop up to 40% of entire image) to focus on the composition's most important aspects. It's ugly. We like to see all movies that were shot in a widescreen format preserved in their original aspect ratio, not as a trim version!

The aspect ratio most often used for widescreen LCD monitor is 16:10, which can displaying 16:9 HD widescreen videos properly, showing just minor black bands (letterboxing) above and below the picture. The display resolutions used range from 1440 x 900 (19-inch monitor), 1680 x 1050 (20-inch to 22-inch monitor), 1920 x 1200 (23-inch and above), or even higher.

A 16:10 monitor with the same diagonal size as a 4:3 monitor has 6.8% less area. A 16:9 monitor with the same diagonal size has 12.3% less area than a 4:3 monitor. The 19-inch LCD widescreen monitor is much wider than the a 4:3 17-inch monitor and offers a much wider viewing area. A widescreen monitor is also closer to the aspect ratio of a typical keyboard than a 4:3 monitor. It's an important issue for a laptop computer, where overall surface area for the device is limited.