4:3 vs 16:9 aspect ratio - what's your preference?

[fantasyfan]

I chose "other" because the aspect ratio will depend on what one is viewing. When I read I prefer a 4:3 aspect ratio. That is also the best mode for the older classic films. When browsing the web, I use landscape mode on my iPad--which isn't really either 4:3 or 16:9 but does allow easier reading of the text. The landscape mode is preferable for modern wide screen films, though a letter box effect is created if one wishes to see the entire screen image. In the end, I don't think the choice is either one or the other. Rather one should have a device which gives the necessary flexibility of viewing oiptions for whatever your main usage will entail.

[Thierry.C]

What about 16/10 ?
It's the closest from the golden number (1.618...).
By the way, I think most e-paper reader are 16/10, aren't they ? (Sony, Kindle, PocketBook, etc., according to their resolution.)

I dislike 16/9 for other screens than a TV.
The best for A4 would be... 1.414 (by order of preference: 14/10, 10/7, 13/9, 4/3, 16/10, 16/9).
For US letter, it's 1.294 so ~ 4/3.
However, there are plenty of p-books that are not "standard" size...
For readability , a text shouldn't be more than about 80 characters per line.
An interesting link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canons_...e_construction

Finally, an economic consideration: for manufacturer coupled to marketing, it's far more interesting to have a big aspect ratio. By claiming the same screen diagonal, one can strongly decrease costs in raw materials.
To put this bluntly, one could sell a screen with a diagonal of 100" with only one pixel width...
We consumers should ask for indication in term of surface + aspect ratio (or + diagonal), rather than diagonal + aspect ratio.

Thierry

[Namekuseijin]

What the fuss is about? 16:9 simply allows for more content on screen at once, be it video or text -- not narrow reading, just more text down there. Case closed.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

What the fuss is about? 16:9 simply allows for more content on screen at once, be it video or text -- not narrow reading, just more text down there. Case closed.

To a point, I agree. However, if you take a 5" screen, the line width on that screen would become too narrow. From 7" onwards, it doesn't really matter anymore...

[kacir]

Manufacturers started to produce those wide computer monitors to SCAM consumers. They claim it is because consumers demand this, but the reality is, that 17" 4:3 monitor has larger screen area than 17" 16:10 monitor. (*)
16:10 monitor might be better for viewing wide-screen movies. But for most computer applications with system menu at the bottom, status line, windows title, application menu at the top, toolbars, or even ... shudder ... ribbon 4:3 will give you more text in a word processor, more numbers in spreadsheet, more books in Calibre, more code in IDE, ...

For books, 4:3 just looks better to me ;-)
This might be because I have been using 4:3 monitors for the last 20 years, and 4:3 TV even longer.
A4 has ratio 1.412:1, which is closer to 4:3 (1.3333) than 16:10 (1.6).
Books here generally do not use A4 or A5, but B or C series format. All those formats have so-called Silver ratio 1 to (square root of 2) = 1:1.412
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4_paper#The_A_series

(*) See a little math here:

4:3 monitor with 20 inch diagonal has:
Dimensions: 16x12 inch
Area: 192 square inches

16:10 monitor with 20 inch diagonal has:
Dimensions: 16.96x10.6 inch
Area: 179.775 square inches

[Quexos]

Gotten totally used to wide screen formats. Can't live without it by now.

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Yes, I'd still prefer 4:3. It doesn't matter so much what it does, as what I want to use the device for.

Narrowscreen (for those of us who use portrait mode primarily) ,means that a 7" Nook Color will display a full page PDF at a physically smaller size than a 6" Sony Reader because most of the larger screen size is in the wrong direction. It defeats the purpose of a larger size.

Sure, it's better for video -and some times for web surfing - but those uses are less important to me than reading. So even a multi-purpose device is better for me with the 4:3 aspect ratio.

It's the double whammy of what's more important to me as a user, and that the drawbacks of "widescreen" on PDF outweigh the benefits it brings to video.

thanks for expressing it exactly as I see it. The whole widescreen thing is a just a way to charge more for less screen real estate anyway. It looks great on the spec sheet to Joe Consumer but to anyone who is not new to the whole ereader world it's not the way to go because as you say it totally does not deliver on the purpose for a larger screen on your ereader.

I was able to find a laptop that was NOT 16:9 but 16:10 instead and it's amazing the difference that makes to the actual square-footage of the display with the difference being it's a lot taller. This is the closest I was able to find to a 4:3 screen which is near to impossible to find in a new laptop, even business build systems. But to be honest, I would be fine with a reader that uses a 16:10 ratio if it was at least 10" or better 11"-12" as my large screen device for reading. It's perfect for a 17" display that I have on all my laptops.

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by Jellby

For general work (writing, browsing, programming, image editing...), I prefer 4:3, I have no need for an overly wide screen. For watching a film, I guess 16:9 would be fine. For an ebook reader, I prefer 4:3 or similar too.

What I really, really dislike is when the image is distorted (stretched/shrinked) to fit in the screen, with no care for aspect ratio. I'm sick of seeing 4:3 content stretched to 16:9 screens in bars and pubs, commercials with long faces, TV shows with a black border all around the image...



Done

Just drink until she/he is pretty...just keep drinking until the horse face flattens out. And don't stop until that happens.

[snipenekkid]

Originally Posted by kacir

Manufacturers started to produce those wide computer monitors to SCAM consumers. They claim it is because consumers demand this, but the reality is, that 17" 4:3 monitor has larger screen area than 17" 16:10 monitor. (*)
16:10 monitor might be better for viewing wide-screen movies. But for most computer applications with system menu at the bottom, status line, windows title, application menu at the top, toolbars, or even ... shudder ... ribbon 4:3 will give you more text in a word processor, more numbers in spreadsheet, more books in Calibre, more code in IDE, ...

For books, 4:3 just looks better to me ;-)
This might be because I have been using 4:3 monitors for the last 20 years, and 4:3 TV even longer.
A4 has ratio 1.412:1, which is closer to 4:3 (1.3333) than 16:10 (1.6).
Books here generally do not use A4 or A5, but B or C series format. All those formats have so-called Silver ratio 1 to (square root of 2) = 1:1.412
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A4_paper#The_A_series

(*) See a little math here:

4:3 monitor with 20 inch diagonal has:
Dimensions: 16x12 inch
Area: 192 square inches

16:10 monitor with 20 inch diagonal has:
Dimensions: 16.96x10.6 inch
Area: 179,775 square inches

ya might wanna edit that juuust a bit. that would be one big momma monitor!!

[kacir]

Originally Posted by snipenekkid

ya might wanna edit that juuust a bit. that would be one big momma monitor!!

In my corner of the world we use coma instead of period, and I forgot to change before copying from Gnumeric.

[CWatkinsNash]

I said other, because it really depends. Since I come from a film background, to me 4:3 and 16:9 translate to "flat" and "scope" (also known as widescreen, panorama, and so on depending on where you are). When film was the only option, there were both the content factor and the price factor, which affected everything from pre-production to final delivery (exhibition), and then on to TV delivery, which gave birth to pan-and-scan and some bizarre letterboxing approaches and messages about being edited to fit your TV. Some people are tremendously happy that everything is "HD FTW!" because they've believed for years that everything should be wide screen. But IMO, content is King and some content works better in one format than in the other; the choice isn't always cost concerns. But perception is a strong force to be reckoned with, as I learned the first time I tried to explain that a 4:3 full frame projected image really is bigger than 16:9 when the screen is designed to show both formats.

When we move away from film and video and into more static content delivery such as text, I find there's two issues - screen real estate and (again) perceptual size. My 11z has a much smaller screen overall but it's an HD-resolution display. So, technically, I can fit "more stuff" on the screen than my old Dell 15" but everything is smaller. It "feels" bigger than it is. The strange thing is, my Kindle vs. my Literati gives me the opposite impression - the Literati his a screen that's about the same width as my Kindle, but it's taller. Instead of seeming larger than the Kindle, it seems smaller. The text seems cramped. Logically it makes no sense, but perceptually it seems too narrow. I *know* that more text can fit on the screen, but I *perceive* that there is less.

Overall, I prefer 4:3 for reading, 16:9 for computer screens, and whichever suits the content for video.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

What the fuss is about? 16:9 simply allows for more content on screen at once, be it video or text -- not narrow reading, just more text down there. Case closed.

The amount of content you can put on screen at once depends on two things: the amount of pixels in the viewing area, and how well the aspect ratio of the screen conforms to the aspect ratio of the content.

A 16:9 aspect ratio conforms very well to current video standards, and very poorly to page standards. If I try to view a full page of a PDF game rulebook on a 16:9 screen in portrait mode, I find a lot of blank space above and below the rendered page.

A 4.3 aspect ratio screen conforms much more closely to the page size of my game rulebooks, and so I can use almost the entire screen in full-page view.

The end result is that I get my choice of either less content, or the same content at a smaller size, by going to a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Page display is limited by the smallest dimension of the screen - not the aspect ratio.

Compare a 7" Nook Color to a 6" Sony Reader or Kindle.

The NC has a 1024x600 screen with dimensions of 6"x3.5"
The Sony has an 800x600 screen with dimensions of 4.8"x3.6

If I take a standard US letter size sheet (1.294) and try to display that on the Sony I get an image that's 4.65" high and 3.6" wide with only 0.15" of wasted space.

If I take the same sheet and try to display it on the Nook color I get an image that's 4.5" high and 3.5" wide and 1.5" of wasted space at the top and bottom of the image.

Bigger screen - less usable space.

When it comes to meeting my needs, any widescreen resolution is significantly less viable than a 4:3 ratio screen.

[JSWolf]

HDTV has ruined computer monitors. Manufactures now think that 1920x1080 is a good resolution to have when itn fact, it's not. We were having monitors going up in resolution. Then HDTV came along and most now stop at 1920x1080. My monitor is NOT widescreen. But is is a 19" monitor at 1600x1200. Which for the size is more pixels for the screen size them most 22-24 inch monitors. The problem is that to replace this monitor, I'd need to get one that is 1920x1200. They are not easy to find at a reasonable price.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

HDTV has ruined computer monitors. Manufactures now think that 1920x1080 is a good resolution to have when itn fact, it's not. We were having monitors going up in resolution. Then HDTV came along and most now stop at 1920x1080. My monitor is NOT widescreen. But is is a 19" monitor at 1600x1200. Which for the size is more pixels for the screen size them most 22-24 inch monitors. The problem is that to replace this monitor, I'd need to get one that is 1920x1200. They are not easy to find at a reasonable price.

I agree - they're substituting size for resolution and we're the losers.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

I agree - they're substituting size for resolution and we're the losers.

The HDTV panels they are using are fine for a cheap monitor. But when we want more vertical space, we lose. Even laptops have crapped out. And there is no reason for that at all. It's just the manufactures being cheap tight-wads.