Hacker News Reader

Comment by helmholtz | Hacker News Reader

Utter joy. There are even 3:2 SKUs. 16:9 screens are an unbridled plague that deserve to be binned tout de suite, especially on 13" ultrabooks. It's like typing while looking at code through a keyhole.

I welcome a future where gamers are told to fuck off, and laptop manufacturers instead embrace professional looking laptops with tall displays with very high PPI, long battery life, non-gamery keycap fonts, and no RGB anywhere.

View on HN

>gamers are told to fuck off

I thought the 16:10 plague was because TV's were typically made in that aspect ratio and therefore it was cheaper to use the same panels in a laptop.

Gamers care more about refresh rate than the aspect ratio.

Anyway, hip, hip hurray for Dell and Lenovo going back to a good aspect ratio for coding.

HDTV has done a lot of damage to computer screens. You used to be able to get pretty hi-resolution CRT screens, but when "HDTV" became a thing manufacturers actually lowered the resolution to 720p so they could call it "HD".

It took 4K for computer screen resolutions to start going up again.

You could get CRTs back in the day that were higher than 1080p with over 100hz refresh rates. I think some of the Trinitons went even higher res. It's only in the last few years that LCDs have caught up.

There's the matter of size. A 24" CRT display is the hell of a thing to have on a desk.

I used 1600x1200 through the 1990s, so even 1080p wasn't all that impressive to me. Now 1440p is getting interesting.

But even apart from the number of pixels, why must screens be shaped like a letterbox? The only thing 16:9 is good for is watching movies, and if you happen to want to do that on your laptop, small black bars at the top and bottom really aren't any problem at all.

On larger screens you can do 2 documents side by side and such.

For a laptop size screen, yeah, wide aspect ratio is not as useful.

> The only thing 16:9 is good for is watching movies

Nope. These are some of the useful side by side compositions:

- Terminal/Editor + Documentation

- Teleconf + Meeting Notes

- One master, two slave terminals

- IDE + Browser (for real time testing)

- etc.

For all of this, I recently got a 21:9 display, and it is absolutely fantastic.

A colleague of mine made the same comment. I'd love to use one too, but my desk has no horizontal space for it. I can only fit a 24" because the new monitors are so-called "frameless" displays.

Sure, but on a big screen. On a laptop screen, you can only read a few lines at a time. Especially on apps that add menus and other stuff to the top and bottom, like IDEs, browsers, editors, etc. A few lines more would do a lot of good. It's really like you're looking at everything through a letterbox opening.

In fact, 15 years ago I had a coworker who used two 20" 1200x1600 on their side next to each other. That worked really well for having lots of text next to each other. It's basically a gigantic 3:2 screen, which is still a tiny bit taller than 16:10.

> Sure, but on a big screen. On a laptop screen, you can only read a few lines at a time.

A 15" FHD screen is as effective as 24" FHD screen for me. If the panel quality is good enough, I can work for hours without scaling and eye-fatigue.

At that scenario menus, extra screen clutter doesn't change anything since everything is proportional to the bigger screen.

That excuse was always BS. It's not as if you take a TV and saw it apart into ten laptop screens. They are made on different production lines.

I thought the 16:10 plague was because TV's were typically made in that aspect ratio and therefore it was cheaper to use the same panels in a laptop.

I've been told this too, but just how many 14" TVs does the consumer electronics industry sell in a year? And compared to laptops? It's hard to believe that laptop sales don't completely dwarf this weird niche 14" TV market.

Just thinking about this for a minute, maybe 16:9 panels are cheaper because they're more efficient to cut from the mother-glass? If the mother-glass is some compatible multiple of 16:9 in order to cut full-size (40" and above) TV's from, maybe cutting 16:10 14" laptop displays from it wastes more glass than cutting 16:9 14" displays from it?

At any rate, it seems like we all agree that 16:9 is a rubbish aspect ratio for a laptop screen. I can't wait for Lenovo to release a 16:10 version of my X1 extreme.

TV's are 16:9, not 16:10.

On Windows moving the taskbar to side of screen gives few extra pixels.

And you bet yo ass I use it :)

I hide all kinds of shit like ribbons, status bars etc. to gain every last vertical pixel I can. Even better if an app will let me rearrange toolbars vertically.

Dock/Taskbar on the side looks even better on 16:10 vs. 16x9.

16x9 is simply unusable for me on a laptop screen. Using an 4:3 iPad with keyboard/mouse reminds me of the good ol days before the HD screen size abominations.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com