More widescreen monitors around the world than 4:3 ones

We’ve all been used to monitors that are mostly square. Televisions in the past have also followed the same design. It’s only in this past decade that widescreens have started taking the place of conventional 4:3 and 5:4 aspect ratio displays. We’ve seen a trend, at least in India where most users in the early 90s used 14-inch monitors and slowly 15-inch displays got more popular. These of course, used 800x600 and 1024x768 resolutions. Slowly, 17-inch monitors got more popular and were used a lot in the early half of the past decade.  These usually had resolutions of 1152x864 and 1280x1024.

Widescreens are here to stay

The trend has now moved towards widescreen displays. Data recorded by Statcounter show that the trend has just switched. There are more widescreens today than there are 4:3 displays. The most used resolution isn’t 1920x1080, but 1366x768. This is a common resolution on 19-inch desktop displays as well as many laptop screens. The report tracks resolutions used by PCs between March 2009 to March 2012 and the most used resolution till recently, was 1024x768. 1280x800, the other popular resolution is also on the decline. The use of 1366x768 can be commonly found in notebooks. A majority of all notebooks sold in the market over the past few years have a resolution of 1366x768.

Widescreen resolutions were adopted as a new standard as they offered good viewing area when it came to viewing movies and gaming. However, since most movies are rendered with black bands at the top and bottom, users are still not able to get proper full-screen movies to play on their displays. Full HD 1920x1080 displays for example have the aspect ratio as 1366x768. However, there are those who prefer 16:10 displays when it comes to productivity as vertical workspace is preferred. Widescreen displays in the very beginning would ship with resolutions of 1920x1200 and 1680x1050, after which 1920x1080 and 1600x900 became the de facto standard. Many would agree that 16:9 displays are cheaper to make than 16:10 displays, which is another reason for them to become this mainstream.