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Hanns-G 191D 19" widescreen TFT |
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Written by Jarhead
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Dec 10, 2006 at 12:09 PM |
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Page 2 of 4
The next game test that I decided to run was Half-Life 2. After playing this game for months on my CRT, I thought that this would be a good comparison based on what I had been used to. Hl2 also supports the native resolution of this monitor, (1440x900) at a 16:10 aspect ratio. Once again, as soon as the menu loaded I felt instantly assured that this was a wise purchase. Because the menus in HL2 are actually a camera angle into a level, I had a good idea at this point what playing the game would be like.
 Half Life 2 1024x768  Half Life 2 options  Half Life 2 1440x900  Half Life 2 1440x900
For those of you who have played HL2, you will know that the intro to the game is a very mysterious offering from the G-man, demonstrating the game's fantastic player modelling features. On this display, it looked better to me than it ever has in the past.
Walking through the first level of the game I was completely shocked by how much difference a widescreen monitor actually makes to the game play, and as the game supports widescreen, I could see an extra 2 and a half inches on either side of the normal field of view. Overall I am highly impressed by this monitors performance in HL2.
The next test was Windows Media Player 11. First off I couldnt find the widescreen option in WMP, however after a quick Live search i discovered you can set the viewing aspect ratio by going to tools\options\display, and changing it manually. After a bit of fiddling about I found that 0.821 was the magic number for the 16:10 ratio that i wanted.
Anxiously digging out and playing my DOOM Dvd i found to my surprise that the aspect ratio I mentioned before only applies to file media and not DVD's. In order for you to get widescreen you have to have another DVD decoder installed such as PowerDVD, according to Microsoft's website. After downloading the PowerDVD 7 demo, I installed with the hope that it would enable widescreen in WMP.
To my horror, all this accomplished was adding the black horizontal bars at the top and bottom of the screen diminishing my viewing pleasure even more. After searching for a considerable amount of time, all I could find on the subject was both of the solutions that I had tried. Suffice to say I'm not overly impressed with WMP 11 in widescreen, or without it i should say.
In addition to WMP, I thought id give DivX player a try. Natively supporting my 16:10 ratio, I was most pleased that the option was a simple right click menu away. Watching any DivX media in the player is awesome. It really is amazing how much of a difference that widescreen makes over the 4:3 ratio on a normal display.
Next some eye candy dual display screen shots.
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