The Widescreen Aspect Ratio
Widescreen is fast becoming the norm for displays. It’s taking over TV and computer displays (both desktop and laptop).
Marketing propaganda dictates that wider equals better. But I think it is not so simple and clear-cut.
Advantages
- Possibly allows for better artistic composition.
- Promotes having multiple documents open side-by-side.
Neutral
- It is a common fallacy to only say that widescreen means getting more horizontal space. It is equally valid to say that widescreen takes away vertical space. (This is a marketing issue.)
Disadvantages
- Less area for the same diagonal size. To take it to the extreme, a display with a nonzero width but a zero height has a nonzero diagonal size, but zero area.
- Human visual system seems to be 4:3. That’s why IMAX’s film format uses 4:3.
- Documents tend to be taller than they are wide; widescreen aggravates the problem when viewing one document on a whole screen.
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Last modified: 2007-05-19-Sat
Created: 2007-04-30-Mon