Widescreen monitors are a scam, driven in the laptop (and presumably UMPC) markets by the fact that they permit manufacturers to mislead customers about what they're providing consumers. They come with two primary issues, neither of which are fixable in the general sense. The first is that they give you less space to work with. Take the 16:10 widescreen aspect ratio, for instance.

19" widescreen (16.1 in * 10 in) = 161 in²
19" real aspect (14.8 in * 11.9 in) = 176 in²

19" widescreen (1440 * 900) = 1.296 Mpx
19" real aspect (1280 * 1024) = 1.311 Mpx

So you only lose around 1% of the pixel count, but 9.3% of the screen area (in terms of screen area, 20-inch widescreen is roughly equivalent to 19-inch 5:4, the other common LCD aspect).

The second is that they give you less usable space. Because my monitor is widescreen, Hewlett-Packard is able to get away with saying that I have a "15.4-inch" screen. I think they even say "widescreen", as though it was a badge of pride. For work, this renders the laptop useless. It is incapable, for instance, of displaying text-heavy PDF files--to say nothing of Publisher and Word documents, with which I work often. I have to scroll more often, which is never useful.

Now, because it is a widescreen, I have to do "less" (I put this in quotes because since I have less screen area and pixel acreage to work with, I don't know this for sure) horizontal scrolling, but that doesn't fucking help me. I don't scroll things horizontally. Horizontal scrolling is useful in, say, Excel--but only in those cases where you have more columns that you care about than rows, and in real life I'd guess that's probably more a toss-up.

Widescreen monitors at the same inch level are also less useful in many games, particularly those not well-optimised for it. Generally first-person shooters do alright, because the "pan and scan" chopping of vertical data isn't all that detrimental in shooter games, which have been horizontally-oriented two-dimensional affairs since Wolfenstein. On the other hand, in non-optimised strategy games--where much of the vertical real estate is taken up by menus--making the screen shorter also lessens the playable area.

Which would be different were it not for the fact that the widescreen format is functionally useless. It is useful for watching movies, but I do not spend most of my computer time watching movies and, as Wikipedia says, "practically any application that is not a movie, such as word processors, spreadsheets, programming environments, or webbrowsers rarely if ever benefit from the widescreen format". We are a vertically-oriented world--look at books and printer paper.

The aspect ratio has its devotees, particularly among movie afficionados, for whom it is useful. To them, I can a extend a degree of respect. To the rest of the industry and its users, who appear to regard "widescreen" as inherently a respectable buzzword and are presumably the same crowd who insist on putting "premium" gas in their 87-octane-rated cars: thanks, guys. You've let the electronics manufacturing world sell you less for the same money. Way to go.

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