Originally posted by: ADDAvenger
Originally posted by: postmortemIA
it is compromise between movies and everything else.
That is true, but I'd heard that the real origin of it was that LCD makers thought we'd all want to have menu bars (volume etc) up while watching our 16:9 movies so they built in the space for it. Unfortunately for them they didn't do any market research or they'd know that everyone hates even having black bars.
I like my 1280x800 screen, it's good for DVDs and it gives me lots of desktop space (as opposed to 4:3 or 5:4) without making the laptop itself really large, although every once in a while (with word docs especially) I do wish it was taller. 16:9 is better than 16:10 in theory, but I'd really rather have a slightly taller screen since I do a lot more than movies on my laptop, and the thin black bars really don't bother me. If the bars do bother you, you can set it to stretch the image a bit, you probably won't notice the distortion.