Quick Widescreen monitor Q

Shakey_Jake33 · 1 Jul 2006 at 09:12

My bro is considering a widescreen monitor for his birthday (so we're targetting the sub-£200 range here), just wondering if 4:3 games will be stretched, or if they will have boarders around the side?

Or if it's screen dependant, are there any we should stay away from? Was looking into the Hanns-G HW191D as it's the only sub-£200 screen with DVI, though if the Acer ones are better quality overall we may go for them.

PieMaster · 1 Jul 2006 at 10:12

If its DVI you can used centred output (in the graphics card driver application) If its VGA it'll stretch.

Baddass · 1 Jul 2006 at 10:28

PieMaster said:
If its DVI you can used centred output (in the graphics card driver application) If its VGA it'll stretch.

i don't think that's entirely true unfortunately. In theory you can certainly set the graphics card settings to "aspect" or "1:1 pixel mapping" but in practice, it doesnt appear to make any difference. The only way (that i've seen so far) to avoid 4:3 games being stretched on a WS monitor it to have a monitor which supports these features. Some models do (Philips 200W6CS, NEC LCD20WGX2, Dell 2007WFP, Dell 2405FPW for instance) but unfortunately the Hans-G doesn't. We've discussed this recently in the thread about the Hans-G and i dont think anyone has had any luck using the software settings. If anyone has had luck, then i'd be interested to hear results

PieMaster · 1 Jul 2006 at 10:55

If I ever need to use a lower than native resolution I enable 'centred timings' in CCC, I assumed it would work the same for widescreen?

Baddass · 1 Jul 2006 at 11:05

it's a weird one as the option is there, but from what WS TFT users have reported, it doesnt appear to work. The monitor still upscales whatever image the graphics card sends it, regardless of whether it is sending it at 4:3 or not.

Shakey_Jake33 · 1 Jul 2006 at 13:04

Are there any widescreen monitors in that price range (we could push £250 I suppose, but...) that are known to do 4:3 properly? I mean, we could just get a 1280x1024 screen, but given we watch a fair amount of movies as well, it made sense to consider a widescreen one.