Advantages to widescreen LCD monitors?

I'm currently shopping for a new monitor to replace my good ol' 17" 6 year-old CRT. I feel like taking the dive into getting an LCD TFT monitor.

While browsing I've seen normal and widescreen monitors available. Aside from the fact that there'll be more space to work with, is there any advantage to having a widescreen monitor? If I were to watch things on it, would I be able to be like.. 6 feet away, the monitor be elevated by 3 or so feet, and still see things on the screen clearly?

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There isn't any inherent benefit to wide screen LCD monitors outside of your suggestions; greater workspace and--potentially--greater viewing distance are the only benefits. However, take note: viewing distance would probably not be so vast, as such depends on more factors than monitor size and type.

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Greater workspace and viewing distance aren't real advantages over regular monitors, though.

1. The vertical resolution for widescreen is usually lower than for comparable regular monitors, so the effective workspace isn't necessarily bigger. You gain a little space to the left and right, but you lose it to the top and bottom.

2. Most computer tasks like text processing and web browsing are much more comfortable on a regular monitor with 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratio, due to increased vertical resolution over comparable widescreen monitors.

3. Viewing distance is determined entirely by the size of the monitor and not its aspect ratio.

4. Many widescreen monitors come with an odd native resolution. If you plan on playing games, you'll probably run into many titles that don't support your monitor's native resolution and interpolation is always lackluster. Besides, only a handful of games are optimized to work with widescreen resolutions, anyway.

The only benefits of widescreen monitors are for movie playback, and this only pays off if you're using the screen primarily for watching movies and nothing else.

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You all also forget to mention that 4:3 monitors only go to 1600x1200 (2048x1536 in some extremely rare cases), while 16:10 monitors hit 1920x1200 and beyond.

Of course not everyone intends to buy a 24" LCD, but I'll just in case you'd like to know, you don't see 22+ inch 4:3 LCD monitors (of the non-TV type).

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The advantage for me is that LCD's are slimmer and so I can push my monitor back against the wall, as oppose to my 21 inch CRT which is this bulky monster that sits in the middle of my desk because of its huge rear.

Anyways, I am wanting a widescreen LCD as well but hesitant about its visual quality that CRT is supreme in.

I was speaking idiomatically.

The point about games is rather silly—as widescreen displays become more and more prevalent in laptops and desktops now, more and more games support widescreen resolutions properly. So yes, if you're playing older games that don't support them, bummer. But most games that come out now support widescreen.

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Originally Posted by Kaiten

You all also forget to mention that 4:3 monitors only go to 1600x1200 (2048x1536 in some extremely rare cases), while 16:10 monitors hit 1920x1200 and beyond.

Of course not everyone intends to buy a 24" LCD, but I'll just in case you'd like to know, you don't see 22+ inch 4:3 LCD monitors (of the non-TV type).

My 17" crt can hit 1920x1080, and it's a pretty damn old model. 2048x1536 isn't so extremely rare either, as long as you don't buy the 75$ monitors.

I hven't checked newest model LCDs, but CRT monitors usually have better picture quality and WAY higher flexibility when it comes to different resolution modes.

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I think that for a single-screen setup I find Widescreen useful for being able to fit more stuff horizontally and multitask, but I still prefer two 4:3 monitors to any other setup.

I regularly use three setups - my desktop on a 20" 4:3 Dell LCD (1600x1200), my laptop on a 15.4" 1920x1200 16:10 screen, and dual 19" LCDs at work for 1560x1024 (A 10:4 or 5:2 ratio). I prefer the Duals the most, followed by the laptop, followed by the 20". One thing to note is that I would go for quality over size any day - While Dell's LCDs give great sharpness and size for the money you can get them at, I am less than pleased with their color rendition. My Laptop (which, admittedly, is a Dell as well) has colors on par with my Trinitron CRTs, while the other Dell LCDs (2001FP at home, a pair of 1901FPs at work) feel washed out and are tough to calibrate correctly. If I had to do it over again I'd have gone for a Samsung or NEC - I've liked those much better when using them - even if it meant dropping to 19" or 17" for my desktop.

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