Thanks for the screenshots newtekie1. But unfortunately, as pantherx12 said, you aren't comparing like with like, as the widescreen shot just had more pixels in it, which simply shows a finer picture and hence the 1280 unmaxed shot fits inside it - the widescreen still has less area. These monitors would be more accurately described as "shallow depth", but then nobody would buy them...
If you go by pure resolution, the sole determining factor of how much can fit on the screen, if you look at 1280x1024 and the closest widescreen resolution 1680x1050, the widescreen definitely has more area. 1280x1024=1,310,720 Pixels 1680x1050=1,764,000 Pixels
If you look at just the vertical area, the 4:3 resolution only has 1024 vertical pixels, and the 16:10 has 1050. The widescreen still has more.
Now I will say, if you go with a 1280x800 moniotor, keeping the horizontal number the same, then yes you loose screen area, but no one does that. That is why it is called widescreen, because the screen is made wider, not shorter. If we did that, they would be called shortscreens...
What I'm talking about is the ratio of width & height, which is completely independent of resolution and physical screen size. This is why it's called the Aspect Ratio and the squarer monitor wins in showing more.
It doesn't win at showing more, as I've and others have said, how much can be shown depends entirely on the resolution. Higher resoltuion means more shown on the screen. Aspect ratio does not matter. This is true even when the aspect ration remains entirely the same. Look at 720x480(SD) and 1920x1080(HD), more is definitely shown with the higher resolution.
In reality, for document viewing, a taller screen wins at displaying more of the document. If that is what you are after, then buying a widescreen that can rotate is actually better than a 4:3. The same 16:10 aspect ration, ratated 90° will show far more of the document then 4:3 ever could.
It all comes down to Pythagoras Theorem, which is explained in this
Wikipedia article.
Also, to prove this to yourself, take a pencil, paper and ruler and draw two triangles. One with the hypotenuse (the diagonal) at about 45 degrees from the horizontal and length, say, 5cm (it could actually be anything convenient). Then draw another triangle with a 5cm diagonal at say, 20 degrees to the diagonal.
Measure the horizontal & vertical lengths of both triangles and multiply them to get the area of a box ie the monitor (divide by 2 for a triangle). You'll find that the 45 degree triangle has more area. There's your proof. I would draw this to make the illustration easier to understand, but I don't know how to do this on the computer, unfortunately.
Another way to think about it, is to consider what happens when you reduce that angle, to say 5 degrees - you now have a "super widescreen" shape and hardly any area. To show any level of detail in it, you'd have to jack up the resolution a great deal and sit about 2 inches away from it to see it.
Of course, the marketing guys all want us to think that widescreen gives us "more", because it helps their sales, doesn't it?
Now you are thinking entirely of dimensions again. The dimension of the monitor has
nothing to do with how much is displayed on the screen. We've gone over this.
Dont work like that ! Hardly anyones monitor is going to have a high enough pixel count to show that pic in its true size. Hence windows resizes pictures to fit your resolution.
That fact that 2560x1600 dog photo wouldnt fully fit in a res of 2048x1536 is nothing to do with the aspect ratio its simply the pic is to big !
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4016/piced.jpg
Look heres a 1920x1200 (16:10) photo shown in its full size. Fits nice on my monitor at 2048x1536 (4:3)
You failed real hard at understanding the point of that example...
The picture is irrelevent(I just used it because my dog is bad ass and it was quickly available to me). The important part that you are missing is the red square showing the difference in amount of viewable area between the two resolutions we discussed. Obviously, when actually viewing a picture, it will be resized to fit any screen. In actuality, the picture was bigger than even that when I started, the original dimensions were 3072x1920...
I could have done the example with simple colors, but what fun would that be?
But if you must have it:
That is the same thing without the picture of SuperDog(no that's not his real name). Notice how the 2048x1536 resolution fits entirely inside the 2560x1600 resolution? That is because the 2560x1600 resolution has more pixels, so it can display more.
As I've said, the 4:3 aspect ratio might give the illusion of displaying more in a few instances, like displaying documents full screen displaying more of the document. However, I've already gone over why this is.