Angles Of Reflection

Sizing Up 16:10, Why and Where?

Over the last few years there have been some interesting video display products come to market with varying aspect ratios.  The first one that perhaps comes to mind are products which have a native 16:9 aspect ratio.  Items like 16:9 video projectors and flat panels are currently sweeping the consumer electronics market place.  It seems that the consumer products industry has finally accepted the fact that the change over will take place in February 2009 from our current analog broadcast systems to the DTV and HDTV standards.  If you want proof of this, go to just about any city across America and visit a big box electronics store.  With perhaps a few exceptions, the displays that are shown in these stores are native 16:9 and many are even capable of accepting 1080p images.

Further proof is in the format war being waged right now between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray DVD.  Who will win this war is up in the air right now.  Regardless, many of us either own or plan to own a 16:9 formatted display for our home.  While it may take a few years for us to replace the secondary viewing devices in our home, I predict that eventually we will have only 16:9 formatted devices for our normal television viewing. 

With that said however, let us look at the computer world.  Here, we find that things are a bit different.  The emerging standard for a widescreen computer format is rapidly becoming 16:10.  For many years the most common format for a laptop computer has been 1024 x 768, which happens to be a 4:3 aspect ratio.  Sure some people have had higher resolutions for specialty applications, but for the most part the largest selection of laptop computers came with this resolution and format.  Today, however, we are seeing several new resolutions come to the forefront of the laptop computer market.  They are 1280 x 800, 1440 x 900 and some are even 1680 x 1050.  Once again take a look at your local big box electronics store.  It is a good bet that the highest selling laptops at their store are one of these three formats. 

Why 16:10 and how did they come up with that format, is something many of us have been trying to answer for a number of months.  One of the most common answers to this question has to do with the process of manufacturing the LCD panels used in laptop computers as well as small desktop monitors.  Apparently, the companies that produce these panels have found that they achieve better yield when cutting the larger pieces of glass down to the 16:10 formatted size instead of 16:9.  I have not yet been able to substantiate that claim, but depending on the size of the original glass, with the LCD elements, that may indeed be the case. 

One other reason I have heard is that you can still have full 16:9 video displayed along with the tool bar at the bottom of the screen. While, I doubt very much that this would be a reason to go 16:10, I do believe it is a benefit. 

Perhaps another reason is because when Apple decided to begin doing widescreen units a few years ago, they chose the 16:10 format as the basis for their monitors.  Why Apple did this is yet another good question.  From the limited information found in other white papers and through an extensive Google search, only one reason seems to hold merit.  That is the fact that you can display pre-press materials in a “two-up” format with a widescreen 16:10 display.  What that means is that you can see two pages side-by-side on one display.  Sure, we can do that now with our 4:3 displays but the content is very hard to read even with a large monitor.  Also, in order to fit the width of two full pages within a 4:3 monitor, you need to reduce the height of the pages and that infers that the full monitor height is not being used.  Since Apple’s Mac computers are, for the most part, the first choice of any graphic designer or pre-press printing company, it would appear that this is a very valid factor.  As we all know, the battle between Microsoft and Apple has been waged for a number of years and it does not look like that will end any time soon.  Therefore, when Microsoft introduced their new Vista platform earlier this year, it is of no surprise that they too chose 16:10 as the base for the graphics package.  That is not to say that it will not operate with a 4:3 display, it was just optimized to the new 16:10 widescreen computer format.  It is very likely that their reasoning behind this was two-fold.  First, Microsoft wants to stay ahead of, or at least stride for stride with Apple.  Second, the laptop and monitor manufacturers have been trending towards this wider format and Microsoft likely felt it was necessary to help promote this trend with its software.

Since the computer and flat panel display companies have been promoting this new 16:10 format, several in the audiovisual industry have chosen to follow their lead.  At the 2007 Infocomm show, several projector manufactures introduced units with a native aspect ratio of 1280 x 800, a 16:10 aspect ratio.  These manufacturers recognize that one of the driving forces behind the visual display market is the personal computer.  Also, we at Da-Lite have recognized this trend and are now making screens available in the new 16:10 format.  For us, this is simply a size change and as such we have added many new sizes to our line so that our products are compatible with these new projectors.

Okay, so we now understand why we have this new format and where it has come from.  How does it apply to us as systems designers when we work out the details of a visual system?  Well, the answer is quite simple.  What we first need to determine is what our source material will be and from what device it is coming from.  For instance, let us look at a training room for a large corporation.  In this example, the corporation has all of their content, both PowerPoint and video, either on a local PC or on a content server.  If the server, local PC and the confidence monitor are configured to run at 16:10 format, then the appropriate projector and screen combination is one that is native 16:10.

However, if the source material for the room is from a broadcast level server, DVD, HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player the choice would be different.  Here, the better choice is a projector and screen combination that has a native resolution of 16:9.  Especially since the source materials are likely to be 720p, 1080i or 1080p.  Figures 1 and 2 below show the differences between the two formats and what occurs when one format is projected upon a display that is of the opposite aspect ratio.

Figure 1

Figure 2

It is hard to tell exactly what will be the long term result of this format war, but for now it appears that 16:9 will remain a consumer based widescreen format and 16:10 is the new business widescreen format.  Hopefully now, you can answer Why and Where?

-- bbrubaker@da-lite.com

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