Can You Help Decipher 'Screen Resolutions?'

Frank, it's a perfectly valid question.

The difference would be you are losing 33.5%... Your current monitor is larger and provides more vertical resolution.

Total resolution would be figured like this:

2560 X 1600 = 4,096,000 pixels
2560 x 1080 = 2,764,800 pixels

You can see the screen you own now has a lot more real estate to work with. That new monitor has only 67.5% of the vertical real estate that you are used to. Since the horizontal dimension is the same, it provides only 67.5% of the total screen real estate that your current monitor does.

As you probably well know, most HD movies and videos these days are 16:9 or 16:10 (cable, satellite, and air). Look at it like this, if I am editing images (3:2 and 4:3) in Photoshop I would be able to see much more of a full size image on your current monitor without the need to scroll down.

That said, 21:9 is basically a CinemaScope or Anamorphic format used when shooting movies. HDMI and Blu-ray support the format, and many new large flat screens are going 21:9 as well. Personally, I prefer a 2560 with a 16:10 or 16:9 aspect ratio on my computer monitor...but would not mind a 21:9 format on one of my TVs since it would allow me better viewing of some of the movies shot and delivered in "CinemaWide". Just a few weeks ago I purchased a new 50" and it was not a 21:9 --> as of today I watch most of my HD movies via satellite, which does not deliver 21:9.

Those 21:9 movies will play on a 16:9 or 16:10 but they have the black bars at the top and the bottom, or they are converted and possibly stretched to fit 16:9 or 16:10.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_format

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaScope

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21:9_aspect_ratio

Vizio's very wide CinemaWide 21:9 TV is a revelation for movie buffs

As far as having both the same it is sometimes a good idea (and my preference) to use the same (or similar) resolutions on each so when you drag and drop from monitor to monitor the windows, tools, and applications stay the same size, and they can fit in the same amount of space without resizing.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

-don

Hi,

I'm not an IM, but an infoproduct creator, who specializes in 3D animation and visualisation. The difference between a video/TV monitor and a computermonitor is basically the flexibility.

Regarding video/TV, the US had a NTSC standard and Europe PAL, both in a 4:3 (screen length x heigth). US was 640x480 at 30 fps rate, Europe was 720x576 (some exceptions) and 25 fps. That was the standard screen resolution, interlaced. Then came the 16:9 aspect ratio, meaning length = 1024x576, in fact the same as 4:3, but the length axis is squeezed and we call that anamorf. Black bars on top or below the picture are 4:3 letterbox. In case of a cinema fomat 2:35, the picture size is simply reduced to fit the screen.

It all changed with HD and the digital revolution. In general, we now have a common standard 1920x1080, which is de facto a genuine 16:9 aspect ratio (not anamorph). And here we finally got rid of the dreadful interlaced system and switched to progressive. Hurray. The only thing we have to worry about now is compression, which affects the image quality. Fortunately, codecs and compression get better all the time.
Now we are looking at 4K (resolution=4096, 2K =2048, a little more than HD). I doubt it the human eye will be able to see a lot of difference between 4 or more K on a monitor. I've watched pictures on an 8K Barco monitor, but then again, perhaps my eyes are not what they used to be.

Computer screens are progressive, more flexible, less limited than a video/tv monitor. The resolution will affect the seize, but not the aspect ratio, provided the aspect ratio is locked. If you unlock it (in your editing or animation software or Photoshop), then you can pretty muck put in any length and heigth you want. However, if a picture or video has been created in another aspect ratio, the image will not crop, but deform.