I consider myself a tech geek so I was surprised to find out the reason. Stupidity through trying to be clever, And this is why:
(from Wikipedia Display aspect ratio):
"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' assumption that people viewing 16:9 content on their computer would prefer that an area of the screen be reserved for playback controls, subtitles or their Taskbar, as opposed to viewing content full-screen"
This seems stupid if you ask me as they could have saved manufacturing costs in the start by just using the existing 16:9 TV apparatus design. Another issue that we suffer today with these not-quite-widescreen LCD monitors is that you either get black bars at top and bottom or the image is stretched when playing video and similar.
And the really irritating thing is that I want to get a LCD monitor as the SED monitors is still far from really hitting the market. But...it is almost impossible to find a good and similary priced 16:9 widescreen LCD monitor compared to the 16:10 availability.
My plan was to get a 19 or 20 inch 16:9 LCD widescreen monitor as that would roughly match the height of a 17 inch 4:3 monitor. Maybe I/we need to wait for the SED monitors to get real widescreen? Or will 16:10 force it's way into that as well?
Another thing that really annoy me is that all these so called widescreen monitors do not seem to properly support 720 or 1080 HD resolutions. It seems the only way to get LCD monitor that properly handles 1080 content is to get a LCD TV or TV/Monitor LCD hybrid.
If the industry really want to be able to move HDTV even faster forward and ditch the aging 4:3 they need to make sure that future monitors are also 16:9 and able to display 1080 properly and with 1:1 pixel ratios. Because as it is now we got 4:3 (SD TV and CRT monitors), 5:4 (LCD monitors), 16:9 (SD TV and HD TV and a handful LCD's), 16:10 (Wide LCD monitors).
With the upcoming SED monitors things will be better as they not only have trhe LCD flat screens, but the image is generated using similar technology to that of the good old CRT's. Meaning that SED's will be able to scale images better since it'll have multiple native resolutions, unlike LCD's which has a single fixed resolution only. And really strong color/light/dark levels like CRT's have vs LCD's.
Sadly the SED's will be so damn expensive compared to LCD's that it will be years before they reach comfortable pricing that LCD has now. *sigh* Oh and can someone please get rid of the damn 24fps, 25fps, 29.97fps Film/PAL/NTSC issue? You'd think that with HDTV that was history...but no, of course not!
Why the heck not settle for just 60Hz TV or just 50Hz TV? Either would be fine as long it's just one, and get rid of that damn "i", interlace should have died long ago when HDTV was introduced as progressive is clearly superior.