TFT monitors are so common these days we don’t even notice they’re there anymore. I remember being in high school when they started to pour in into the common knowledge and even basic 15 – 17 inch size units were so stunningly expensive basically nobody had them. Except for real estate agents on the desk in their main guest room. Looks before everything! CRT monitors – the fat boulder size ones – gradually lost ground to them because of their superior statistics in emission, quality of picture and external size.
They were easier to sell to gaming enthusiasts as they could carry them to lan parties at their friends’, they saved space on many office desks and now they’re here to take their share on our walls as the most important part of a media center.
First of all, a tft panel used as a television has to be big for one reason; people don’t want to sit 2 feet away from them while watching a movie, and when they’re 10 feet away a 15” screen just will not cut it. It has to be big to be visible while laying on the couch.
It may be somewhat of a detour, but wide screen formats made bigger tft televisions possible. To be able to comprehend why we will have to dig a bit into the manufacturing processes and basic structure of these widescreen monitors.
TFT monitors are made of a screen panel, some electronics and the plastic or aluminum casing. Our main point of interest is the panel this time as this is the most important factor limiting the size of a screen. These panels are made of wafers, or layers of transistors, basically the same thing that is in a processor, or any chip in a computer for that matter. These transistors are relatively small but every single point of light or sub-pixel on the screen is one of these transistors.
In the factory every wafer is cut out of a silicone crystal and the size of this crystal is limited by rules of physics and are relatively expensive to work around. The screen aspect ratio in a regular pc monitor screen used to be 4:3, a more natural ratio for glass tubes in old big monitors. Since the limited size of a crystal during manufacturing these panels a new aspect ratio had to be found to cut the crystals in a way that doesn’t produce much waste.
Cutting down on the waste is obviously good because we get to buy the monitors, televisions cheaper and consequently the manufacturers are able to cut bigger screens out of one given size wafer.
There is one more reason why buying a widescreen monitor would be beneficial. The aspect ratio of the human eye is somewhat closer to this kind of wide view, as the eye developed to see more to the sides than in up and down direction without looking around, probably because threat usually approached on foot. This is what these screens use to make sure you see more of the programme without having to move your eyes.
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