Since HD began, widescreen TVs have been 16:9 ratio in screen size. But widescreen computer monitors have always been 16:10 ratio. If you’ve got a 24″ LCD, it is undoubtedly the 16:10 ratio of 1920×1200. But just over the last few months, a few 16:9 ratio monitors have come out and many think this will start a new trend since computers will be used for HD content more and more.
An example of this new even wider ratio is the Samsung 2343BWX 23″ LCD
. It just came out in February and has a 2048×1152 16:9 resolution. This has 3 major advantages. The first is that if you play HD video, it can completely fill up the screen since it matches the 16:9 ratio. The second is that if you cut the screen in half, you’ve got 2 windows of the width 1024. This happens to be the magic width that most web developers try to build for. The result is that you could have 2 browser windows side by side on this monitor. The last advantage is that even though this is 1″ smaller than its 24″ older brother, the 2048×1152 resolution actually has more total screen real estate in pixels than the 1920×1200. You cut about 4% on the height but add about 6% on the width. Dell has gotten into this game too with the SP2309W which has essentially the same specs as the Samsung. At Dell, the monitor is so popular it now has a 3-5 week wait if you order today.