Widescreen is a useless format.
Our eyes are best suited to a round image, or 1.1
4:3 is ok but 16:9 is ridiculous unless the image is huge
like in a cinema, where it is so big the format is not relevant
as you have to move you eyes (and head) to see the whole
image.

I'd easily go widescreen on the desktop if there were any decent options availiable.. but paying through the nose with resolutions below 1920x1200 just isn't an option (.. and the price of those 23" Apple's are nothing short of horrifying)

On laptops, on the other hand, it's quite a different story: http://images.tinytimm.com/8500_3.jpg - Inspiron 8500, does widescreen 1920x1200, and it's nothing short of amazing.

My only real problem is that most (all?) the games that "support" widescreen don't give you a wider view, but instead crops the image so you can't see as high/low as you would in a 4:3 resolution. A workaround is adjusting the FOV, but that's not always possible.

STEAM CS 1.6 examples:
http://images.tinytimm.com/cs_wide.jpg
http://images.tinytimm.com/cs_normal.jpg

Quake3
http://images.tinytimm.com/q3_normal_small.jpg (normal, fov 90)
http://images.tinytimm.com/q3_wide_small.jpg (widescreen, fov 99)

Quake3, FOV adjusting vs default FOV
http://images.tinytimm.com/q3_wide.jpg (fov 99)
http://images.tinytimm.com/wide.jpg (fov 90)

And what am I doing with my 100GB+ collection of porn wallpapers?

I have a smaller trinitron and a larger non-name brand in my rig right now. You can really tell the difference in quality. If I was not broke and didn't swear by having a duel monitor set-up I would ditch the large one.

Speaking of which anyone know of some good priced (under $400), high quality, 21 inch monitors?

What I want to know is how many people sit in front of and use three (or more!) monitors. Is anyone using those tri-head Matrox cards?

Okay so if we dump 4:3 why can't we just adopt 16:9 and be done with it. We should have a standard widescreen ratio not just random crap. The way I look at it 2160 would be a great number of horizontal lines to aim for. That way you can emulate 1080 HDTV with a perfect 2x2 scaling and 720 HDTV with a perfect 3x3 scaling, unfortunately 480 DVD signals would only use 79% of the pixel real estate at 4x4 scaling but we would have to go to 4320 to have perfect scaling for all three. At 4320 you could have a 44" display with 200dpi. Of course with 2160 you get a more reasonable 22" display with 200dpi.

Very nice, but I'd prefer the iMac's 1400x1050 resolution over 1280x768. Heck, I'd prefer 1600x1000, to allow for side-by-side 800x1000 browser windows.

The portrait mode is insanely cool, though.

Widescreen, schmidescreen - what I want is a screen that is *taller*.

A 19" monitor with a 4:3 aspect ratio just doesn't do the job for me - but a 19" monitor with a 1:1 ratio sure would. A big square screen at 1200 x 1200 or 1600 x 1600 is my dream monitor.

What I want is something that can overcome the way apps all waste so much precious vertical screen space with menubars and toolbars at the top of the screen and then a statusbar down at the bottom. I want more *vertical* room for whatever I am viewing - I very seldom need more width.

Even a 17" monitor at 1024 x 768 is usually wide enough for 95% of what I do - I just run out of vertical space because on a 17" monitor the UIs for the apps take up as much as 30% of the height of the screen.

You can only look at one at a time--why not just enable more desktops and switch between them? it's basically as easy as looking at a second monitor (probably faster, even).

You can find apps for doing it in windows but they all suck, unfortunately.

ah, you've come to the right person. I suggest a panoram technologies lcd. Of course you could go for the GVR X series, but you would need a really big room with 20 foot ceilings.

http://www.panoramtech.com/products/index.html

if you cant afford a couple hundred thousand bucks the pv230dsk has 180 degrees of lcd surround.

Nothing really compares to these but hey, prove me wrong.

I have that sony 24" 16:10 widescreen CRT. It's very nice for movies and for having things side by side. at 1920x1200 resolution you can do a whole hell of a lot more and quicker then with traditiaonl 4:3 or 5:4's. It's real good for movies too.

aivars

I have a Samsung 172w 17 Widescreen. Res is 1280x768. I love it! Plus you can go to the .cfg file of any game (Q3 Based, UT based, Serious Sam etc.) and change the settings to allow custom resolutions. So I play all my games is the native 1280x768 res. It rocks.

I own a SW1600 SGI monitor and it is awesome. If this Philips monitor had come out before I see no reason to not have bought this over the SGI one.

Get another 15". TripleHead Surround Gaming is not limited at all.

http://www.matrox.com/mga/3d_gaming/surrgame.cfm

With 1260x1024 LCDs out there, whats the point of accepting one with less viewing area? (I have a 'widescreen' LCD on my Fuji P, 1280x768, for a small screen it gets the job done, but I'm used to more vertical room so it can get cramped sometimes.)

Some of the newer DLP and Plasma TVs have DVI input so you can use 1280x720 progressive on them. 1920x1024 would be even better but I'm afraid they are interlaced at this time.

MS has been demonstrating Longhorn on ws monitors a great deal lately and they are also pushing to have the DPI raised. So MS is really hooked onto the AV + PC concept (HTPC?).

Personally I wouldn't mind doing some web surfing and email etc from the couch as long as the resolution is there. WebTV + Xbox is probably what it's going to come down to.

My iMac has a 17" widescreen.

I love it, but it's not quite as useful as everyone thinks. Yes, I can have two windows open side by side, but what usually happens is that I wind up opening one window a bit larger anyway, so I wind up partially covering the other.

I suppose if I had a 23" widescreen, things would be a bit different, but on a 17", with my eyes, it's not a big advantage.

Seems like a lot of sub 19" LCDs are more in the 5:4 category (1280X1024). This res used to bug the crap out of me on my 4:3 monitor, but when the screen proportions are right, as they are on my new Hitachi LCD, it's the perfect medium between 1024x768 and 1600x1200. I never understood why the industry didn't standardize on 1280x960.

Widescreens are a must if you use your computer for a lot of different things. I work on mine, watch TV and DVDs, and game on it.
Its great to have a bigger, widerscreen.

Widescreen LCDs are nice, but i'll stick with my widescreen CRT.
I just like it better, regardless of its heat and space problems, for the reasons people always list when comparing LCDs to CRT.
i.e.
No struck pixels
Better Color and B/W
Better viewing angels
Able to change resolutions with no image degradation.
Faster screen redraw
etc...

Widescreen all the way ... if only I could afford it .. sigh...

Looks ALOT like the old 1600sw from SGI...Hey, they thought it was a good idea!

http://www.hothardware.com/reviews/images/1600sw/1600_rtside_hr.jpg

Widescreen is the future and they will trickle in just like widescreen tvs...

But for now, they look funny with games, especially ones that can't take advantage of the resolution...

Widescreen will be the shit thougth when we all have 23-30 inch Organic LED monitors.

Apple's got a new 30 inch widescreen LCD coming out.

I'm glad you've brought this up. I'm considering an LCD myself, and one of the monitors I've looked at is a widescreen 17" Samsung. As nice as they look, it's very hard to decide between it and a 18 or 19" 4:3 which boast similar price tags.

I watch movies quite a bit on my system, so there are sure advantages in going wide, but can I really justify the cost? I'd like to hear from someone with a widescreen LCD.

A few years from now...

But I digress. What I'm really trying to get at is GamePC's latest review of Sony's BFS9900XXX Ultra Pro desktop IMAX...

Sheesh... where will it end?