Quote from: manofthefield on July 22, 2007, 11:38:46 AM
On a related note... what's the deal with all the new computers coming with widescreen monitors?  I prefer a normal "square" shaped monitor, but will I be sorry in a few years?  I probably won't be using for TV or DVDs, or giant spreadsheets, so what's the big deal about a widescreen? Other than it's what all the cool kids are doing...

The reason is that more and more people are using their computers as multimedia stations and watching movies on them. College kids, people on budgets, etc. Many movies come out in widescreen and it is considered the "top choice" by most people. Therefore the industry makes more of them now so the prices have come way way down. Get whichever you like really. I have a 21" CRT monitor. I could have gotten a widescreen but it's not what I wanted. I have a 36" LCD TV/Monitor for my movies. So, you're perfectly fine with your monitor. Buy what YOU want.   

Yeah, I was noticing the lower prices too.  If you compare the area of a normal screen to a widescreen of the same dimension the widescreen has a smaller area, therefor fewer pixels, which is my guess as to why they're cheaper.

The screen shape of a widescreen is ideal for what I do. I have as many as 4 5250 terminal sessions open (telnet client windows to an ibm I5 server) at the same time. Just makes life easier to reference objects and code snippets without flipping back and forth through windows that are in the background or minimized. Of course my work monitor is also a 24" widescreen. My new PC is coming in soon and it supports dual monitors and the boss says I can have a second 24" monitor. WooooooHoooooo.

I have a New Sony Vaio . got it off ebay , i got it for 200 quid ,its 3 months old , its worth 1300 quid , and i bought a wireless keyboard and a 19 inch widescreen monitor , so at home i use it like a desktop ,  when i go out i use it as a Laptop ,its got a LCD screen anyways ,but being a notebook ,13.3 inch loll

Well, my monitor bit the dust today... I thought it would last a little longer but oh well.  I had been having a few episodes where the screen would shut off, but the power light would stay on... I had to let it sit for a while until it cooled, then I could use it again.  Today it just random turned off, power light and all, and now it's just a big boat anchor. 

For now I'm using a 15" who knows how old Samtron that came with the house I'm renting.  God it sucks.  And it's gonna be even worse when I come home from work tomorrow after looking at my 20" dell lcd at work all day

This is looking really tempting at $170: Westinghouse L1928nv

Go to www.tigerdirect.com you won't be sorry.

I really can't find anything cheaper there right now, except maybe a couple refurbished models, or models with only VGA input

Input time for Kasumi.

Widescreen is cool for watching movies and sucks for playing games. Theres nothing like trying to take a head shot with a sniper rifle on battlefield 2 when you open up the sites and their ovular  Its mightily annoying.

However widescreen is the bees knees if you don't play games, you get extra screen area to put all the useless window boxes you have open everywhere and you can view widescreen films at a bigger size. On a normal monitor the widescreen film has to smaller to compensate for the width of the movie file. On a widescreen it can be bigger. However even on widescreen monitors its not like the movie would utilize the whole screen anywhere because widescreens really would need to be very wide to utilize the full height.