I write this post from none other than a widescreen monitor.
I have noticed that the world is clearly going to all widescreen. TV of course is going widescreen, that is what the entire high definition standard is focused around, being wide aspect ratios. And slowly but surely, computers are going completely widescreen. I wasn’t so sure about this when I first noticed it happening about 3 years ago. I kept telling myself that it is stupid to have widescreens for the desktop. I really didn’t have any interest in that because it seemed to me that you usually want more height in your displays for computers. Especially for web browsing and text editing. While these are two applications where widescreens are bad, in general widescreens look a lot better.
I think the one invention that had to happen to in any way allow widescreens to successfully come to computers was the scroll wheel on your mouse. It is probably near impossible today to find a mouse and enjoy using said mouse without a scroll wheel. It was a pain to have to mouse over to the scroll bar on the side of the window to scroll through things, but I do remember those days very well.
So, the widescreen revolution, as I’d like to call it, started primarly on laptops. It makes good sense on a laptop. My MacBook Pro, and almost every laptop I see around school has a widescreen display. They are useful due to the fact that a wider keyboard can be included on a still fair size screen. You almost have to do some shopping around to find any decent laptop with a 4:3 display, but they are still out there.
Next, the desktop started seeing more and more widescreens. The leader here was probably Apple by switching all their computers to widescreens several years ago. And at the beginning of this last summer, I purchased my very first widescreen monitor. I did a little research on this but not too much because I kind of needed an LCD monitor in a hurry. I still picked a pretty decent one especially for the price. I picked the ViewSonic Optiquest Q20wb. It got me through my situation where I needed the LCD and is still used every day. When I moved back home after the summer, I replaced the crappier of my 2 CRT monitors with my new LCD monitor. Eventually, I decided the CRT just looked ridiculous, and I eventually stopped my computer from giving it signal and once I discovered I could live without it, I took it off my table.
The single monitor was definitely something that could work, but I still had an itch to need that second monitor back. So, I started watching it on the on-line stores. I eventually noticed it start to disappear from some of them, which led me to believe it may not be around for too much longer. I don’t know if this feeling is right at this point, but I’ll continue on. I eventually sucked up the price tag and my lack of job position at this point and went for it. I ordered another one. It felt good when I clicked the confirm button. I waited with extreme excitement all week for it to arrive.
Now that it is here and hooked up and running, I feel at home now. I never thought that I would like 2 widescreen monitors, but as of now, I find that I’m in love with the setup. Sure, it is very wide, but you just have to love the 3360×1050 resolution. So here I am, sitting with a widescreen MacBook Pro to my far left, and two 20″ widescreen monitors directly in front of me, in all their glory. It is very nice having 2 matching monitors for a change, too. I highly recommend!
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