More seriously, how can you recommend a widescreen, thats NOT (or marginally) wider than a 4:3 "tall" screen. You get any coverage the widescreen has and then some. At the worst you will be watching 16:9 movies with black bars (which allow subtitles that dont occlude the image btw) that have the same dimension as your 16:9 screen.
That's just me. I like the ergonomics. 20" 4:3 is a pretty huge monitor if you want to sit directly in front of it, and if I'd put that on
my desk (which may be built a tad too high), I know it would be too tall for comfort
for me. I know that because I have a 19" 4:3 CRT which is already problematic.
But that's just me. I haven't held back the information that there's extra area to be had on the 4:3 display
Npl said:
Or you could game with splitscreen, which would be two 16:6 screens (ultra-wide), how`d you split a 16:9 screen?
You'd wait until you have four players
Some games I've seen do a vertical split (2x8:9). Doesn't work very well, mind you.
Npl said:
And more philosophically, I consider the whole 16:9 is more natural talk bullshit. You see the human FOV argument is weak, and I consider it more important to look at our focal point (the area which we can see clearly), which seems to be pretty much like a circle. IMHO the only reason most people consider it more natural is that movies are filmed in wide resolutions. For the simple reason that cinemas (and other buildings) typically stack people horizontally.
I'm not so sure about that.
I don't have any research about that in front of me, but my focal point seems to be a pretty small spot, like, what, one or two inches on the screen (current viewing distance is estimated at 20"). Wouldn't be much fun having a display just for that small area.
You dismiss the FOV thing too easily. You don't have to build a divide-by-zero-width screen. What everyone's trying to do is
approaching the human FOV with a practical limited display area.
Try looking up as far as you can by moving just the eyes. Down. Left, right. Up, down again. I may be a wimp but I find vertical eye movement much harder.
Theory: creatures that fly or dive all day would likely have a FOV that approaches 1:1. Vertical movement isn't doing much for us as a species because we live on the land. Hence the wide fov.