Should you go widescreen?

Computer displays have traditionally echoed the shape if not the size of the domestic TV. Indeed, early home computers used such TVs as monitors. This gives us the familiar 4 x 3 rectangle we’re used to.

On such TVs, movie transmissions and their accompanying top and bottom black bars are rather dissatisfying and, with DVDs providing full widescreen video, the way to appreciate them fully is to purchase a widescreen TV.

The advantages of widescreen monitors for DVD and TV watching are obvious. Just as widescreen TVs have gained hugely in popularity, so notebook displays and now PC monitors have followed.

Products such as Media Centre PCs and hybrid TV/monitors fuse multimedia and PC functionality and are perfect examples of how the widescreen format is starting to take over.

High Definition TV (HDTV) equipment blurs the distinction between video and computer equipment still further as the quality requirements of each converge.

Unlike the composite video and Scart connectors traditionally found on TV sets, the component video and digital inputs on modern multimedia displays are capable of handling high-resolution graphics from PCs and the latest generation of games consoles.

These are all widescreen devices and, as more and more content is created in widescreen formats, our 4:3 monitors are looking increasingly old hat.

Today we want to use our PCs for more than sending emails and surfing the web. As the media we create and use is increasingly in widescreen formats our desire for widescreen displays will increase.

Many traditional applications also benefit from widescreen display. Applications such as Adobe Photoshop use a large number of detachable palettes. Their vertical orientation makes them ideally suited for placement at the sides of the screen.

The same applies to many content creation applications and even to programs such as Microsoft Excel, where scrolling a large spreadsheet in only one d irection is so much easier than in two.

Audio and video-editing applications such as Steinberg Cubase or Adobe Premiere are based on horizontal timelines – perfect for a widescreen display.

Possible glitches

Unfortunately, widescreen displays can sometimes cause problems, not least because of older, incompatible software that doesn’t understand the ‘strange’ screen resolutions required. This can result in full-screen applications that assume your 16:10 display has a 4:3 ratio, causing images to be stretched out of shape.

The prime candidate for this kind of problem is games software. Many games are designed to run at any of a small selection of screen resolutions, quite often excluding widescreen ones.

Sometimes you can tweak configuration files and graphics driver settings to get them to support your screen shape, but sometimes you might even have to resort to editing the Windows Registry. But unfortunately, not all games can be helped in this fashion.

Luckily there are many widescreen gamers who have gone before you. Sites such as Widescreen Gaming Forum provide discussion forums, tweaks organised by game title and even downloadable utilities that automatically configure your games for enhanced widescreen use.

So that’s another reason to delay going widescreen thrown out of the window.