Gadgetory

have you ever wondered why most TVs and monitors were that boxy almost square shape until recently well back in the 1890s Thomas Edison and his assistant William Kennedy Dickson introduced a device for viewing films called the Kinetoscope this device displayed an image 35 millimeters wide yep just like film introducing the four by three aspect ratio but what is an aspect ratio well simply put an aspect ratio is the ratio of the width to the height of the image being displayed so this same 4 by 3 ratio was adopted by many movie and TV producers making it the standard for decades because that's how it often goes in the film industry once you've adopted a standard thanks to the cost oh goodness the cost of the equipment it's really hard to run around changing it all the time and so it wasn't until the early 1950s that widescreen was conceived and this is kind of funny originally widescreen despite having you know obvious benefits was used as kind of like a marketing gimmick by the movie studios why watch movies on your 4 by 3 TV at home when you could watch a widescreen movie at your local theater not to mention paying more for it and buying a bag of popcorn while you're at it so widescreen ratios became widespread starting in 1953 with a system called the Cinerama that used three projectors on a curved screen now unfortunately this proved to be too expensive leading to the development of single projector widescreen as well as movies produced for flat screens which is kind of funny because curved displays are had now starting to make a comeback is like technology is almost the same as fashion at a certain point at first widescreen films were actually made by removing the top and bottom edges to create a 15 by 9 aspect ratio very close to what is seen in most displays today but later 20th Century Fox collaborated with French professor Henri Christian who helped to create a special anamorphic lens that squished a widescreen image onto regular film so when played back through a second anamorphic lens the resulting image had an aspect ratio of two point three five to one almost identical to the modern twenty one by nine ish filming standard nowadays TVs very commonly used the 16 by 9 aspect ratio we've come to know and love adopted because it could display videos recorded in other common aspect ratios without a ton of cropping or Distortion so not surprisingly this format was chosen for broadcast HDTV but the story doesn't stop there sixteen by nine is also the most popular gaming resolution and is used with popular streaming websites like YouTube vessel Hulu Netflix and countless others not watching in 1080p that's fine because sixteen by nine was also chosen because it down scales easily to other resolutions but even with the ubiquity of sixteen by nine many people still prefer even wider aspect ratios because they give you a more immersive experience thanks to the fact that they fill up more of your visual field flying through space in no man's sky driving off-road in dirt three you're just playing minecraft in a 21 by nine ultra wide aspect ratio can be deeply engaging so due to this more and more games are starting to support 21 by 9 natively and we're seeing 21 by 9 monitors become more common in the marketplace so where does this leave us for the future well I wouldn't be surprised if the market for ultra wide content and hardware continues to grow not just because of its immersiveness but also because of its benefits to content creators productivity minded people and the manufacturers off displays who desperately need something new to sell you and there's also little doubt that we'll start to see new aspect ratio standards start to pop up thanks to the rise of VR the oculus rift for example uses a 16 by 10 aspect ratio to fill the wearer's feel the view as much as possible a new hell maybe we'll just make our own special linus media group aspect ratio for optimal loop viewing after all viewer satisfaction is what we're 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