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Originally Posted by BajaGringo
I don't mean to be an "agua-fiestas" but what is the downside to going to widescreen???
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Well, aside from being annoying, and a useless change from an already established standard, the 16:9 format has other, more quantifiable problems...
Set size - think of it this way. What's at a larger premium in a house? Horizontal space, or vertical? Horizontal, of course. There's almost always room above and below your television, but not normally room to the sides. So, if you're replacing a standard 25" television, with a new wide screen set, a set the same width will be smaller! To get the same size picture you had before, you need to go a fair amount bigger. Now, this may not be a problem - you have room, you say. But, let's say you have one of those huge, wall-filling four foot wide sets. Now, you've still got space above and below the thing, right? Wouldn't it be even more awesome if it was 4:3 and gave you that bigger picture?
Program format - 90% of everything on television is 4:3. Even as things transition, there is, and will continue to be, a lot of 4:3 programming. And any reruns are going to be 4:3. Because of all the "standards" to choose from now, the picture will either be displayed with bars, cropped on the top, or horribly distorted and stretched. Programs that _are_ 16:9 sometimes don't even get handled properly. I've seen more than one 16:9 set displaying bars on all four sides, with a small 16:9 picture in the middle.
Usefullness of 16:9 - face it, very little actually takes advantage of the wide format. They shoot the same way they did before. The action is, as it should be, centered. The extra "stuff" at the edges of the picture isn't useful to the broadcast. Who needs to see an extra couple feet of desk to either side of the news anchor? What's the point of showing an extra couple of feet of a room or street - the actors are in the middle anyway. Very few movies even make use of this extra space. Pay attention, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Basically, there is NO REASON for broadcast television to be 16:9. Yeah, the format is fine and dandy for movies in theaters. But television? Come on!
On computers, the 16:9 display can come in handy for some. But, once again, there are drawbacks. The standard screen resolutions that have been around for years are meant for a standard screen. This isn't as big of an issue with computers though, because the "programming" you're "watching" changes with the hardware, and doesn't linger around in "reruns" too often.
Also, with laptops, it's especially silly. In an device that's intended to be small, do you really want this wider screen? I suppose you could say that the machine can be shorter in the other dimension for the same width, but once again, you lose screen area.
From a useability standpoint, the 16:9 can help in graphical environments, because you can now have two windows side by side. I give it that. Now, this seems like it would be nice... provided of course, that you're GAINING horizontal resolution with the 16:9 display - not simply losing vertical resolution. All too often, with these wide displays (the ones I've seen, that is), they don't provide more than 1280 pixels horizontally. So... OK... I do 1280x1024 on my 15 year old 17" CRT monitor. I could "upgrade" to an LCD panel, and get 1280x768. Ooh. It's nice and wide. And I get, wait a sec, I'm just losing vertical resolution! I now have LESS display space than I had before. And now I have glare.
I'm not even going to get into the loss of color definition and poor black levels of LCD displays...
-Ian