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Comment by NateDad | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely. I hated when everyone started making 16:9 monitors. The 16:10 ones weren't quite as bad, but seriously, give me some vertical pixels. Especially true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen at possible.

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Get a monitor stand that swivels, so you can use the 16:9 ratio to your advantage. The only catch is that you start noticing when people write long lines over 120 chars, though they shouldn't do that in the first place.

Edit: It's also really awesome for reading/editing documents, since you can fit the full page onscreen.

I'm doing this right now @ work with 2x16:9 monitors. Coworkers are amazed and amused, but if you don't do this with IPS panels, the vertical viewing angles (now horizontal) are pretty bad on most non-IPS monitors... so it's sometimes hard to share your screen.

I do this, however I feel my 16:9 monitor is just a touch too thin, whereas 16:10 gives a perfect width.

> Especially true for coding where it's useful to see as many lines of code on the screen at possible.

Have to disagree here.

For Java and iOS development widescreen is far better because it allows project tree on the left, code in the middle and outline/inspector on the right.

I wrote more Java than I'd like to admit, all without an outline window: my setup for the last ~7 years is two emacs windows (emacs calls windows what the rest of the world call panes. it is strange like that) side by side.

3:2 used to be the standard screen ratio. just look at your 15 inch CRT monitor.

the industry then went for 16:10 the so called "WIDESCREEN" at that time, and now 16:9

Actually the old-school CRT monitors were much narrower even than 3:2 (1.5) - they were 4:3 (1.33), just like NTSC television, and very close to the very-old-school "Academy Ratio" in the movies.

Which is the reason the movie business invented wide-screen: To make their movies darn near unwatchable on standard television. HDTV went wide-screen to chase the movie business, which has in response pursued ever more extreme ultra-wide ratios (12:5 or 2.40 in not-insane notation) for their blockbusters, so even with a brand new wide-screen HDTV, you get letter-boxing and only partial vertical resolution when you watch the latest Batman movie or whatever.

Now there are some small movements in the direction of ultra-ultra wide-screen in the computer business, and it doesn't bode well. [1]

So it's Hollywood's fault that your computer screen has a stupid shape, just as its Hollywood's fault that it has a stupid interface (HDMI/HDCP), too.

[1] http://www.cnet.com/laptops/toshiba-satellite-u845w-s410/450...

Eh, wide ratios aren't a new creation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Hur_(1959_film)

That's around when Hollywood's widescreen response to television happened.

I don't remember seeing 3:2 in widespread use. What you used to have was 4:3, a vastly superior aspect ratio especially on laptops.

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