As you may (or may not) have noticed, over the holidays we’ve been tinkering with the default design of the PraiseNet, changing our preferred resolution from the standard 1024x768 to the emerging “widescreen” standard of 1280x800 (1280x762 and 1280x1024 will also work well). I mention this only for the two or three people out there who might actually notice or care. The fact is, consumer computing is moving away from square screens to “wide” screens, so some of the PraiseNet’s design elements needed to be re-thought to work well in the 16x9 (“wide”) aspect ratio. At a recent visit to several electronic stores, I was actually hard-pressed to find any square monitors on the shelves, which disappointed me in that it exposes how gullible and uninformed most of us are.
A computer screen is not a television. TV’s are becoming “wide” because of the new digital broadcast standard. Computers, hooked into the web, tend to scroll up and down, not left and right. You don’t need a wider screen, you need a taller screen. But there’s no market at all for “tallscreen” monitors, as people tend to emotionally assume a widescreen monitor is somehow more advanced than a square one.
It isn’t. It’s just a way for manufacturers to sell you a new monitor, when you don’t need one. Sure, a “widescreen” monitor looks cool sitting on your desk, but it’s really impractical for computing, which, again, works this way: up and down, not left-to-right. In most business and graphics and even gaming applications, a widescreen monitor is less efficient than a square one as everything has to get smashed through this horizontal slit just so your PC monitor can look “advanced.” It’s not advanced. You just got suckered into spending money you didn’t need to.
If you legitimately want more space to work with (like a designer or gamer), then what you want is a second monitor, not a “wide” single monitor. With a second monitor, you can put all of your design palettes, gaming controls, etc. on one monitor, leaving the other monitor clear for actual workspace. For office workers, your email can be open on one monitor while you’re on the web on the other one, and so forth. With a “widescreen” monitor, you’re still flipping back and forth between windows flopped on top of one another—there’s virtually no difference, other than you getting soaked for the extra cash for your “widescreen” monitor.
Most everybody I know now is getting a “widescreen” monitor. And, they don’t want a 15-inch or even a 17-inch, both of which are in danger of becoming extinct. No, the minimum most people I know will accept is a 19-inch widescreen “flat screen” (what they mean is TFT) monitor. The main reason given: “So I can see,” these folks complaining of hard-to-see text on small monitors. Most people assume, the bigger the monitor, the bigger the text and the images, the easier to “see.”
They’re wrong. A PC monitor is not a television. Televisions have fixed aspect ratios, which means the bigger the TV, the bigger the picture. A PC monitor has a variable aspect ratio, which means the bigger the monitor the more of the picture you can see (like zooming out with a digital camera), but the picture (and text) itself is the same size no matter what size monitor you buy. In fact, the bigger the monitor the SMALLER the images on the websites. The images and text on a 17-inch square flat-panel monitor is BIGGER than the text on a 19-inch “widescreen” monitor. But I can’t get anybody to believe me when I tell them that, so Mother Sister plunks down more money and still ends up squinting.
If people want more screen space, I tell them what they want is not a WIDE screen but a second monitor. Because, inevitably, these folks plunk down their money for this widescreen display and open their application and Explorer windows to the full width of the screen, blocking out all open windows. These folks don’t know how to use a widescreen monitor effectively, and therefore render the extra pixels moot the second they plug the thing in. They can’t see any more open windows on their “wide” monitor than they did on their square one, and, oh, look, the text is actually smaller.
If you’re having a hard time reading text on your monitor, just adjust the screen resolution. For square monitors, the optimum screen resolution is 1024x768. For “wide” monitors it varies (and gets complicated), but try 1280x800. To change your monitor resolution, right-click on your desktop and choose PROPERTIES. Then click the SETTINGS tab, and you’ll see your monitor resolution settings. Or, better, you change the font size in the APPEARANCE tab, using large icons and fonts on the high resolution, so you have the best of both worlds: the extra desktop space and readable text.
But that's too complex for, like, 90% of computer buyers. Most people never adjust their monitors and are already rolling their eyes at me while squinting at their “widescreens.”
