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Spotlight
A Wider Perspective
9/19/2005
Widescreen Benefits
It’s easy to lose sight of the benefits of widescreen, given the trouble it has and will cause in educational institutions. But there are benefits; here are a few:
- More screen real estate. For power users, this translates into being able to see more windows/applications simultaneously. In Excel, you see more columns. In PowerPoint, you can now have a nice picture next to your list of bullet points.
- Bigger screen in the sameheight room. In most classrooms, the limiting factor is not image width, but image height (based on ceiling height and sightlines). This d'es not by itself guarantee better results, since you would still have the same number of rows of data or bullet points, but creative presenters will find ways to effectively use the extra display room.
- Everybody’s doing it. Like it or not, most new laptops carried by instructors and professors will be widescreen aspect, and not instructors all will know (or think) to change their desktop resolution every time they plug into a classroom display system. So, since you can’t fight it, embrace it. After all, it looks ‘way cool.’
- Throwing DVI into the Mix The increasing resolution and bandwidth requirements of computer-and HDTV-source displays, and the desire to eliminate digital-to-analog and analog- to-digital components from sources and displays, motivated the Digital Display Working Group (www.ddwg.org) to develop the Digital Visual Interface (DVI) standard.
There are two common versions:
- DVI-I, which incorporates both traditional VGA analog graphics and the new alldigital DVI signal in a single connector, where the VGA signal can be broken out via adaptor, and
- the DVI-D, which lacks the analog pins and is digital only. In this application, VGA is referring to analog video/graphics signals in general, not specifically to the 640x480 resolution. The main benefits of DVI are: Displays talk to the source and request the optimal resolution, without user intervention. An XGA-native display will always get 1024x768, without the user having to make four to five mouse clicks.
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