Well, my old BenQ 17" LCD has blown its backlight, so it's time for me to buy a new monitor.

I've done a bit of research, and the Samsung 940BW seems to be the (current) bee's knees, and for a very reasonable price to boot. I spent about an hour reading reviews & comments about this monitor, and it seems that very few people have anything bad to say about it.

So, my question is, how do widescreen monitors handle lower resolutions? I am frequently dropping back to 800x600 or lower for the older games I like to play (generally under DOSBox or ScummVM).

When a widescreen monitor drops to 800x600 (or other lower 5:4 resolutions), will it stretch/squash the output to fill the screen? That is all that's holding me back at the moment. I even have clearance from the "minister for war and finance" (wife) to spend the money.

For what I want, am I perhaps better off buying a "normal" (non-wide) screen?

Thanks in advance for any input.

But i run the games in a console window and that makes it bearable. running 1440x900 normally though.

Well, I bit the bullet and bought it anyway.

Fullscreen DOS games don't look that bad, even when stretched to fit the 16:10 screen.

I had some hassles initially getting the thing to work in 1440x900, but that was easily resolved by cutting & pasting the "Screen," "Monitor" and "Modes" sections from this person's xorg.conf file. Hooray for open source.

This monitor seems to support sub-pixel rendering better than the old BenQ did. Text is visibly sharper. I'm happy with it.

The only disappointment I have is that apparently there are no 1440x900 vesa framebuffer modes. Occassionally, I like (or need) to start up in text mode, so I'll have to put up with a stretched 1024x768. But, other than that, it's all good.