Seeing the announcement of Canon's "widescreen" camcorder reminded me to announce that...
Widescreens are Scams
In particular, Staples runs items in its fliers showing how widescreens on notebook computers give you XX% more screen. Not.
The reality is that notebook manufacturers found a way to give you XX% less. For instance, the resolution of widescreen on my notebook computer is 1280x768. If you are familiar with standard screen resolutions, then you know that a standard screen is 1280x1024. Compaq cut off the bottom 256 pixels -- a loss of 25%.
I do like widescreen for its physical advantage: it makes the notebook computer narrower, and I'm all in favor of smaller. The drawback comes with viewing photographs taken vertically: they end up being tiny. Also, some software doesn't understand the non-standard aspect ratio, and so makes things took squished.
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