Does anyone else hate the new widescreen displays ?

Question

I'm not just venting here. I wanted to shout this from the mountaintops to the powers-that-be at Dell. But Mt Ranier still doesn't have an elevator.

I've decided it's time for a new laptop (actually my mother made the decision for me when she decided she liked mine.) So I hit the stores, both online and B&M. I immediately see a disturbing trend. All the displays are widescreen, which means the height of a 15 inch display is almost 2 inches shorter than my old 4:3 aspect ratio 15 incher. The sales minions tell me it's because people want to watch DVD's on their laptops. People are paying $1000 for a DVD player?!? You can buy a DVD player at Walmart for 20 bucks. And what fraction of DVD's are in widescreen format anyway?

I use my laptop for work. When you cram the window bar, 2 tool bars at the top and one at the bottom and that panel thingy at very the bottom of the screen you're left with about 3 inches of working area in your editor space. I suppose you can get more if you can read microscopic fonts. I can't. So to get a 9 inch tall screen I have to go to a 17 incher. They're huge! Lugging my old 4:3 15 incher through the airport was work enough. I'm gonna need wheels to lug a 17 incher around. I might as well glue casters and a rope to my desktop and travel with it.

This is crazy. And they're all doing it including Dell. I've waited months in hopes this was a quickly passing fad but it's persisting. And I already promised my mother my old laptop for Christmas. Arggg.

'nuff said. Anyone agree or am I standing alone here?

ejn63 · Answer

They didn't tell you the real reason for the shift to widescreens - more of them can be cut from a single sheet of mother glass, so they're cheaper to make.

There are still some 4:3 screens, but as widescreen TV takes hold, they'll probably eventually disappear as people lose familiarity with them.

mbibt · Answer

I agree completely. That's why I recently bought a Latitude D520 with 4:3 screen. Now I see that its successor D530 is out. You should go for this model. I actually expected Dell to phase out 4:3 models with the D520, but fortunately not as the D530 is brand new with the latest chipset. Intergrated grapics , which is fine for a work laptop. Very silent is it too. You can get it with 1024X768 or 1400X1050. For me 1024 is pefect as I can't read the small fonts in higher res

I run it with XP, although shipped with Vista. XP is much faster and more responisve and use less CPU= less noise

http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/latit_d530?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd&~tab=bundlestab

Bjorn

Message Edited by mbibt on 11-24-2007 08:58 AM

apchar · Answer

Thanx for the tip Bjorn. I'll check out the 530.

krasev · Answer

I do... I hate those idiotic widescreen displays. That's why I have bought Latitude D530 15" XGA. It's great!

Show me the moran who watches the movies on a laptop? There is a big screen TV for this! :))))

So why do you need a widescreen display!.... to see vertical black bars? or distorted image and more distance to move mouse? Marazm!

Oditius · Answer

Err here I am... My wife watches her junk on the TV, I hook in the earphones and watch what I want. I don't have a second TV in the house. Only other place to put a second tv would be the bedroom, and I believe that room is used for 2 things, 1 is to sleep, and the 2nd ISN'T to watch TV. :smileywink:

Oditius · Answer

I love the wide screens. I can keep several windows open side by side. I have a 19' wide screen monitor at work. It comes in handy when I have to work, I can see the other info as I am typing in another window. But I would suppose it's a personal preference. As far as my laptop concern, it's not a problem.

Balaji Ramanath · Answer

Obviously, a lot of people are buying widescreen laptops and not enough people buying regular-screen laptops, so the manufacturers are shifting to widescreen en masse. You can shout at the top of your lungs, but will you pay $100 or $200 more for a regular screen as opposed to a widescreen? If not, then the manufacturers are doing the economically right thing by making all their laptops with the cheaper-to-manufacture widescreens.

And as for me, I love widescreens. I find it easy to fit a lot more columns of my spreadsheet into the visible area of the screen instead of scrolling from side to side. Top to bottom scrolling is always easier than side-to-side scrolling, so anything that reduces the latter, even at the cost of more of the former is welcome for me.

And I watch movies on my laptop too. I can go sit wherever I want and watch movies in privacy and peace instead of jockeying with others for space and time in front of a TV. Also, any decent movie-player software should have a feature to convert a full-screen movie into wide-screen without the black bars on the side. Wide-screen is the native aspect ratio of practically all movies anyways (in fact it is wider than most laptop aspect ratios, so I have DVD's that have black bars at the top and bottom of my widescreen laptop screen), so if DVD's are still being made in full-screen format, you never know what is being cut off at the sides to make it fit old-style TV screens.

littledan8 · Answer

I agree 100%. I am especially frustrated with the absence of the 14.1 non-widescreen Latitudes. Yes, if you do work with spreadsheets, a widescreen can be great, but otherwise not. And the Latitudes are targeted at business users, so watching movies should not be a priority. I noticed one respondent mentions loving their 19" widescreen monitor. That is a whole different issue than a laptop screen.

I sat a 14.1 widescreen next to a 14.1 XGA side by side, and for web browsing, email, word processing, the tall screen was clearly superior for getting max information on the screen. I realize you can get the 15 inch XGA/SXGA D530, but that is big machine overall, 13 1/4 inches wide. The 14.1 widescreen D630 is also 13 1/4 inches wide.

So Dell, please, bring back a tall-screen 14.1 Latitude. My D610 is perfect dimensions, just getting a little old and slow...

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Does anyone else hate the new widescreen displays ?

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