LCD TVs and Monitors are ALL Widescreen???
 

Has anyone ever seen an LCD TV (not necessarily HDTV) or even an LCD monitor, that is:

a) 4:3 (not widescreen), and
b) larger than 20" diagonal?

This is too weird. It seems like EVERYTHING more than 20" is 16:9. Given the huge number of 4:3 CRTs >20" you'd think there would be a replacement market. And of course for people who watch mostly standard programming and want to stand more than 5' from the TV...

Yeah, the widescreen thing actually sort of sucks. a 26" widescreen is about comparable to a 20" regular screen.

Hopefully all broadcast content will be widescreen in the not-so distant future. TV broadcast quality is a technology that has not kept up. Screens have been poor res 4:3 for the past 50 years, I'm willing to toss the old tube sets and move on.

I remember 25" color sets in the 70's selling for well over $1000 (when a new 911 was $6000). I would much rather spend $1000 today for a 26-32" lcd display. I was in Costco today, and can't believe how much better/cheaper TVs are today.

I wouldn't mind a bit if the content actually WAS in widescreen, but it's not. Actually, if you exclude movies and HD, almost nothing is in widescreen.

So, for the content involved, a $700 26" widescreen is equivalent to a $400 20" 4:3. The space doesn't warrant a 32"+ TV. All I want is a nice, lightweight, wall-mountable, 24-27" 4:3 SDTV. How hard can it be???

Apparently pretty hard.

Hell, you can get a nice crt 20" for $200 or less.

I'm so used to watching regular TV in widescreen that now when I see it on a 4:3 TV everything looks squished.

I think this is was an FCC mandate that all new tv's be HDTV-compliant. The work-in time has been delayed somewhat due to consumer acceptance.
Why the FCC is mandating entertainment format beats me. Mabye because it uses less broadband by compression(?), but mabye new tv's also transmit the viewed content?

I miss the old FREE tv signals which came through the airwaves, and didn't send back a viewing profile to the company. There was still plenty of commercials, but at least you didn't have to pay to watch them.

I'll tell you exactly why. Because they are preying on the fact that people are especially clueless about math and it's all about the bottom line. People think 26" is 26", right? Not really when you are measuring TV's of different aspect ratio.

If you were to measure a 16x9 TV with a 26" diagonal the width and height would be roughly 22.7x12.7.

If you measure a 4x3 TV with a 26" diagonal the width and height would be roughly 20.8 and 15.6.

Whatever, one's more square, we all knew that. Generally in the world of rectangles, the more square a rectangle is the more area it covers. So the 4:3 TV has a surface area of 325 sqin and the 16:9 TV has a surface Area of 288 sqin. You get a smaller screen, and the bigger it gets the more area you loose. So you actually get less picture for the size.

More screen costs them more money to manufacture, and the average person has no idea that they are getting less TV.

The FCC mandate is for sets to be digital compliant, not HD (which is of course digital also); It's a tiered system where larger sets must be digi 1st (now) then down a couple step with the last being all small screen and any other electronics w/TV reciever must be full digital by '08 or '09 at which time the analog TV bandwidth will be re-assigned to other uses.
Cable and satellite may remain analog if they wish.

Right now most (if not all) broadcast stations are putting out 3 signals; std analog, SD-digital, HD-digital.

If your buying as set now, the very least you should look at is a std-def with both analog and digital tuners built-in, but judging from the market for HDTV sets I'd have to guess that the even the SD digital stations and sets will fade from the market in the next decade or so.

"Math is hard"
- Malibu Stacy

I would like a 36 " mostly square flat panel television to fill a spot in a custom entertainment cabinet I had built 7 years ago. At the time I only had a 27", but I measured many 36's to make sure they'd fit. Now my POS 36" tube is dying and I can't find something the right dimension to fit, unless I buy another tube television. Any suggestions?