- See our chart: Top Wide-Screen Notebooks
Photograph: Marc SimonThere's a new angle in screens these days--wide angle. You can choose a wide-angle flat-panel monitor to grace your desktop, or a wide-aspect flat-panel LCD TV for your living room or to hang on the boardroom wall. And now, three years after Apple introduced the first wide-screen laptop, wide-screen notebook PCs are really coming into vogue.
The standard, squarish laptop screen has a width-to-height ratio that's usually expressed as 4:3 or 1.3:1, about the same as a television set. In contrast, a wide screen is more rectangular, with a ratio of 16:10 or 1.6:1. The wider shape permits you to keep more documents on screen at once so you can avoid having to toggle through them. You can also comparison-shop easily at two Web sites positioned side-by-side, for example, or you can see more of the data in a large spreadsheet.
But a bigger display area is not the only benefit that wide-screen laptops provide. They usually have larger keyboards than their standard counterparts offer; some 17-inch wide-screen units even include a separate numerical keypad, which number crunchers may find very handy.
We examined seven recent wide-screen notebooks, including two 14.1-inch models from Compaq and Gateway; four 15.4-inch units, from Dell, Gateway, HP, and Micro Express; and a humongous 17-inch laptop from Fujitsu. Though we enjoyed seeing more on each screen, we found that users do have to make a few compromises. For example, the wide screens make the units a bit more difficult to tote.
Wide-screen notebooks don't make great out-of-the-box gaming machines, because of their wide aspect ratio; however, you may be able to avoid a stretched picture by using some games' command-line settings or your video card options to switch the aspect ratio to 16:10. If you plan to show projector presentations prepared on a wide-screen laptop, be careful. You'll need either to create the presentation in a standard resolution or to set the correct aspect ratio on the projector.
Will you have more fun with a wide screen? Unless you come across a DVD recorded at an aspect ratio of 1.6:1 or 1.78:1 (as opposed to the 1.85:1-to-2.35:1 range that Hollywood prefers), a wide screen won't spare you from the letterbox effect. On the bright side, though, a letterboxed DVD movie plays larger overall and is easy to watch on a wide screen because the screen's dimensions approximate the shape of the picture more accurately.
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