4:3 is an underrated aspect ratio

3 risposte [Ultimo contenuto]
commodore256
Offline
Iscritto: 01/10/2013

I make an effort to only use 4:3 CRT monitors and I've been watching 16:9 content with 4:3 Pan N' Scan via MPV functions and I feel it looks better and more cinematic even though Cinemas haven't been designed that way since the dawn of television. I like the closer shots making you feel closer to the character and since they're closer they look bigger and creating the cinema larger than life experience even though I only have a 17-inch screen. The few times I went to the cinema in the past 10 years, I felt like the only part of the cinematic experience is still alive is the herd experience (well, not so much in the past year) where we humans are social animals and the more company we have, the more impactful the experience, but it never really felt larger than life because while the screen is bigger, it's far from your face making the screen not feel big.

I feel this problem was overblown, but I liked the experience that early DVDs gave people, it let people enjoy films how they wanted to, there was widescreen on one side and full screen on the other. Sometimes you done need to see everything in the shot and sometimes you can just "cut the fat" and it's better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN_Te9c8-7c

Run that through your favorite invidious instance

PS: I didn't even mention the productivity benefits and how much better it is for a laptop.

lutes
Offline
Iscritto: 09/04/2020

> PS: I didn't even mention the productivity benefits and how much better it is for a laptop.

I could not agree more. I dearly miss the 4:3 screen which came with my very first laptop. I tried to keep using that laptop as long as possible in order to retain the 4:3 aspect ratio, because I never saw any advantage in reducing the visible height of any sort of working document for an nonexistent gain in width.

I still have access to a couple of 4:3 19" monitors and I would use them instead of the 16:9 15" screen of my current laptop for most work purpose. I sometimes have access to a 16:9 22" monitor, which beats the competition, being wide enough to display two documents/windows side by side quite comfortably.

commodore256
Offline
Iscritto: 01/10/2013

Two productivity advantages I see with a wide monitor would be something like timeline editing and spreadsheets where the wider would be the better, so ultrawide would be best for that, but I think for text documents ultrawide would be ultra tall in portrait mode and ultra impractical, but 16:9 in portrait sounds good. I think long ago the aspect ratio of human field of view was already solved, I measured a notebook and ran it through an aspect ratio calculator and the book with two pages open is 5:3 of which is like 15:9 and that's really close to 16:10, but I still love 16:12. (4:3)

With all of these monitor fads to get people to buy monitors they don't need, it wouldn't surprise if some vendors started marketing 16:12 monitors and youtube influencers saying it's BS, it's just 4:3, but they would state the advantages that 4:3 had that wider monitors didn't. I'd love to see a 45 inch Micro LED 16:12 monitor. I'd love a replacement to the largest CRT ever made.

nadebula.1984
Offline
Iscritto: 05/01/2018

Because 4:3 (or 5:4, 1280*1024) LCD panels are not as profitable as 16:9 ones, let alone 21:9, manufacturers forcibly discontinued it. They would without fail argue that 16:9 or 21:9 panels are better for watching movies. But what I want is a productivity tool, not a portable cinema.

I still keep several 4:3 aspect ratio devices:
Dell 2007FP desktop display (UXGA, 1600*1200)
ThinkPad X30, X40, X41/t, X60/t, X61/t (XGA, 1024*768 or SXGA+, 1400*1050)
ThinkPad T43/p, T60/p and T61/p (SXGA+, 1400*1050 or UXGA, 1600*1200)
ThinkPad R50p (QXGA, 2048*1536)

Among these, X61/t or T61/p with 8 GiB of memory is still very usable today. The GM965 integrated graphics has similar performance with X200's GM45, and much better than X60's 945GM. Albeit 4-GiB DDR2 modules are very rare and expensive.