19" Widescreen with fixed aspect ratio scaling?

[Uriel]

I'm thinking of getting a widescreen monitor but the 20" ones are generally out of my price range. As I understand it, most monitors will automatically stretch a 5:4 or 4:3 ratio image to fit 16:10.

I have an X1800XT and I'm anticipating the possibility of having problems displaying a 4:3 or 5:4 image at a 1:1 aspect ratio. nVIDIA's drivers sort out this problem by showing an image at native resolution with black borders around the scaled image, thus keeping the aspect ratio. The best I'm aware of with ATI is a centred image but some monitors automatically scale this to fill the screen - hence squat fat characters potentially running around my games that don't support widescreen.

I know Dell's monitors do fixed aspect ratio scaling so a 4:3 image will be shown filling the screen vertically but with blank bars at the sides. Are there any 19" widescreen monitors that have this feature?

The next best thing would be one where I can turn off any automatic scaling and have images displayed in the centre of the screen at the native resolution with 1:1 pixel mapping.

I'd like to know which 19" widescreen monitors support either of these features.

Of course if ATI sort out a decent solution in the CCC none of this would be a problem...

Edit: I found this article, pointed out by BadAss, somewhat helpful but the list of monitors is rather limited at the moment.

 

[marc2003]

i don't think any 19in monitors support 1:1 pixel mapping - but then there is no need. just about any combination of operating system and gfx card will support running your desktop at the native resolution of 1440x900. and most games support this resolution too without having to stretch. a common misconception is that because you cannot see the resolution available at the moment is because the game does not support it - that's not the case - it just won't show up until a capable monitor is connected.

performance wise you shouldn't worry about running games at the native res as it's actually less pixels than all 17/19in 4:3 screens 1280x1024 size.