Quote Originally Posted by marwan
I was running a 16:9 video on my widescreen laptop(hoping it would fill the entire screen), and noticed that the video has thin bars on top and bottom of the screen, which made me think, are widescreen laptops 16:9? why wouldnt it fill the entire screen like on my HDTV? then i fired up Half Life 2 and noticed that the game supports 16:10 aspect ration....and i was like WTF?. I did a search on 16:10 and i found out that practically every widescreen laptop is actually 16:10 and not 16:9(16:9 is a bit wider than 16:10). it's hard to tell the difference unless you check the resolution both support. for example, 1900x1200 is 16:10(PC monitors) and 1920x1080 is 16:9(TVs)
He does have you there Ninjas. Google was used before making the thread. But you didn't read the largest pagagraph of the topic did you?

Anyway, to answer the threads question;

computer and laptop widescreen displays are in the 16:10 aspect ratio both physically in size and in pixel counts, and not in 16:9 of consumer televisions, leading to further complexity. This was a result of widescreen computer display engineers' uninformed assumption that people viewing 16:9 content on their computer would prefer that an area of the screen be reserved for playback controls or subtitles, as opposed to viewing content full-screen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television