As far as I can tell, about the aspect ratios - the bigger the ratio, the smaller the actual display area. I mean, the manufacturers advertise and sell us diagonals, not screen areas. But, for example a 19'' 4:3 ratio monitor has bigger area than a 19'' - 16:9 monitor.

Personally I've always found 16:10s to be the most useful for a range of things. At first I was annoyed when they became so much rarer than 16:9, but honestly limited selection doesn't bother me too much as long as I can get a model with decent colour reproduction that doesn't require me to sell a kidney. (Cause stealing other people's kidneys is a messy job, and I rather not give companies my own.)

Like selenoidz said, I think its a problem with wrongly simplified measurements that got into use when all tv screens were 4:3 and therefore still comparable and manufacturers profiting from them to sell less area with the same x inch sticker as if it were actually better cause it looks more cinema like.

Its the same with cameras advertising 2*2=4x more pixels and implying it was 4x better when the visual quality is imo more related to the number and distance of pixels in one dimension and just 2x better.

Since I got a 16:9 monitor I often feel its kinda wrong and there's either area to the left/right I can only see when moving my eyes or head or some space missing at the top compared to the familiar old 4:3 years ago, but those dont get made anymore cause xx% less area and similar monitors for computers and hd tvs means less costs and many things were adapted to the new dimensions already.

If new screens get even more wider people will possibly just use the left half for reading and then hopefully use the right half to replace the second monitor.

If monitors go extra-wide they should really bring in curved displays. I've seen a curved TV.

On the measurement thing: honestly I'm surprised they never tried measuring the area (width × height) for starters (even back in the day). I mean, the numbers would be larger, and thereby seem more impressive.

If monitors go extra-wide they should really bring in curved displays. I've seen a curved TV.

On a related topic, this is another thing most people forget when talking about multimonitor setups. Not only monitors aren't in sync (so no vsync for you), have different physical properties (they may even not have the same color depth) and even different pixel size (good luck getting something with the same size on both monitors), they may be located anywhere in 3D space, which means that for all we know we could have monitors making a loop or not put together side by side or something.

Really, there the issue is that our current concept of a single desktop on multiple monitors is broken, we should treat them like separate devices as they are. This is probably a legacy of early GUI shells that didn't have the concept of multiple workspaces, these days we could just assign a workspace per monitor and solve most of the issues =/