My old 19" LCD Samsung monitor has given up, I find it is very expensive to replace it with a new LCD monitor of the same size and geometry as most new monitors on the market are now "widescreen".

My question is: is there anything odd I should expect if I buy one of those (Samsung S20A300B) for word processing applications (no interest in graphics)?

At first glance, the wide screen seems to be a bonus as it displays more of the layout of (my) HTML pages but I need more crisp characters than good and nice colors.

Any hint, comment, help most appreciated.

Not sure what the question is here, exactly. The reason new monitors are 16:9 is because it is a more comfortable viewing ratio for the human eye. There is no downside to using a widescreen monitor, it is a clearly superior display format.

As for clarity and color, those traits have nothing to do with the aspect ratio of the display, but depend on the quality of the monitor itself.

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Why would this be different between your last LCD and your replacement?

That makes sense; thank you for pointing it out. I wondered why it had been chosen and was becoming prevalent. That may explain why screens of A4/letter aspect ratio never caught on and why few people use 4:3 ratio screens with 4 as the height rather than conventionally as the width.

Not so sure about that regards reading text. When the eye gets to the end of the line it must flick back to the beginning of the next line. The longer the line, the more difficult that is. Probably that's why we favour portrait format over landscape, or are more inclined to use multiple columns with landscape. If it was only caused by the physical limitations of typewriter design we would be seeing more pressure to move away from formatting documents in portrait for A4/letter paper.

If 16:9 is going to become the ubiquitous standard then I predict we will see the most common document format becoming A4/letter landscape with two columns -- and we will want editors for programming that display in two windows, side by side.