“why watch a movie on your PC, anyway?”

Because it looks better than the crappy TV sets most of us can afford?

And maybe because not everyone has expensive DVD players, and DVD-ROMs are a cheaper and better (IMO) alternative for someone who spends a lot of time on PC?

As for “little less,” there are many PC gamers out there, who can appreciate the superiority of widescreen gaming. Please don’t count them off just because gaming may not seem “serious enough” for you.

Also, working in Photoshop, CorelDRAW and many similar graphics software is way more convenient in widescreen. Take it from a graphics designer with more than 15 years of working experience.

Also, there’s Excel. When I had a 4:3 monitor, I had to scroll horizontally a lot while working with tables. Now I don’t have to anymore, because I see all my data at once. Yes, I still need to scroll vertically, but that’s a lot more comfortable, provided your mouse has a scroll wheel.

Speaking of scrolling: you still need to do a lot of vertical scrolling in both 4:3 and square formats, and plus some occasional horizontal scrolling, which is more cumbersome, since it’s generally not supported by mouse wheels. Widescreen format pretty much kills the need of horizontal scrolling, which is another plus.

Bottomline: Yes, people often tend to follow “fashion trends” in hardware mindlessly, but IMO the mentioned “widescreen madness” is incorrectly regarded as one of these silly trends. Many people really find widescreen more appealing and useful, that’s all. And for those who prefer working in other formats, including squares and portraits, the industry still leaves a lot of options, so I really don’t see a problem here.

My current laptop has a widescreen but for much of the time there is a large amount of blank space on the right half of the screen while most of the actual work is hidden below.

Surely there must be a market – at least within the business, scientific and academic community – for 4:3 screens?

And what about digital photo frames. Why the heck are some of them 16:9? A square format would be much, much more sensible. Ok, so you’d see black borders on every image, but at least portrait-orientated photos won’t suffer.

I work with data – database tables and spreadsheets. I scroll a lot on my widescreen laptop.

Wide is good, but so is height.

The resolution isn’t as sharp at the ViewSonic I owned, but I wanted to stay with the square format. I hate the wide screen, so this was my only option. I know when these are gone – then I will be out of luck.

Hope this helps those of you that want to stay with the square screen.