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Spotlight

A Wider Perspective

9/19/2005

By Will Craig

Before you plunk down the dollars for those widescreen laptops, better weigh the pros and cons mighty carefully.

TAKE A WALK down the laptop aisle of any major electronics retailer and you will see that 4:3 aspect ratio screens are disappearing faster than summer in Minnesota—and that’s not because they’re being snapped up by consumers. Truth is, they’re no longer being produced; the widescreens are taking over. In fact, some industry analysts estimate that widescreen laptops will garner as much as 85 percent of the market within a year from now. New laptops are also sprouting a funny-looking connector next to, or in place of, the traditional VGA HD-15 jack.

Both of these trends will have a significant impact on technologyenabled teaching design and planning. Widescreen Primer Non-CRT (cathode ray tube) display devices, such as LCD/DLP monitors and projectors, have a fixed number of picture elements (“pixels”) arranged in a grid pattern. The number of horizontal and vertical pixels is considered the “native resolution.” The box below details the resolution differences between conventional and wide screens. This is not a comprehensive list of digital display resolutions, however; there are products with hitherto-unknown resolutions being released all the time.

Widescreen Pitfalls

It’s important to know that many conventional-aspect LCD monitors (and some projectors) don’t handle widescreen resolutions well. Actually, some XGA and SXGA LCD monitors won’t display them at all. Early adoptors, who have paid premium prices for widescreen projectors and large flat-panel monitors, have found that not all widescreen is the same: Often, their display is 16:9 aspect while their source is 16:10 (or 15:9), or vice versa. This results in the image being cropped, or in blank areas on the screen which are frequently not symmetrical; the image is anchored on the left side of the screen, with the right edge appearing as a wide blank band. Expect to see such aberrations continue, as some manufacturers have found that it is more cost-effective from a production-cost standpoint to make 16:10 aspect displays, rather than 16:9.

Then too, lack of product availability hampers efforts to modify technology-enabled teaching system design to be ready for the impending widescreen revolution. While there are an increasing number of wide-aspect projectors available, the pickings of wide-aspect desktop LCD monitors are still slim. If you connect a wide-aspect desktop or laptop running 1440x900 to a wide-aspect projector, be sure to check to see if your desktop monitor can handle that resolution. We’re seeing 17-inch monitors with 1280x768 resolution becoming available, but in a limited number compared to the prevalence of widescreen laptops.

As if it’s not bad enough that your regular desktop monitors don’t work with widescreen, other instructional tools may not be ready for widescreen resolutions, either. Most, if not all annotation monitors (e.g., Smart Sympodium; www.smarttech.com), are conventional XGA or SXGA displays, and lack the capability to handle widescreen images. And videoconferencing codecs and collaborative conferencing tools are still based on conventional aspect ratios and resolutions. Clearly, any incorporation and implementation of widescreen in the classroom must involve testing of existing equipment to determine which systems are compatible and which will need to be replaced.

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