There has been a drive in europe to gradually move to 16:9 since the early 90's, infact some of the earliest available WS sets were from Nokia. This was spearheaded by the system known as PALplus, where the black bars of a 16:9 letterbox were encoded with extra information, the point being if you watched on a 4:3 set you saw a 16:9 picture and if you watched on a 16:9 PALplus telly you'd get extra resolution. Checkout http://iiit.swan.ac.uk/~iisteve/palplus.html as I haven't explained this very well. Anyway, PALplus didn't take off as the DVB standard was set and people started to go that way, especially as DVB would free up the current airspace for mobile communications. Widescreen sets are now readily available, but as pointed out above, to get a 4:3 picture of comparable size to a large 4;3 CRT requires an huge screen CRT or RP telly. Something that alot of europeans don't like, and don't want to have to afford, 24, 28 and 32" ws sets are the norm. And contrary to what has been said above these aren't actually that expensive...I remeber the days when a 32" sony used to cost 1700 quid, now they are around the 700 mark for a bog standard set...
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There has been a drive in europe to gradually move to 16:9 since the early 90's, infact some of the earliest available WS sets were from Nokia. This was spearheaded by the system known as PALplus, where the black bars of a 16:9 letterbox were encoded with extra information, the point being if you watched on a 4:3 set you saw a 16:9 picture and if you watched on a 16:9 PALplus telly you'd get extra resolution. Checkout http://iiit.swan.ac.uk/~iisteve/palplus.html as I haven't explained this very well. Anyway, PALplus didn't take off as the DVB standard was set and people started to go that way, especially as DVB would free up the current airspace for mobile communications. Widescreen sets are now readily available, but as pointed out above, to get a 4:3 picture of comparable size to a large 4;3 CRT requires an huge screen CRT or RP telly. Something that alot of europeans don't like, and don't want to have to afford, 24, 28 and 32" ws sets are the norm. And contrary to what has been said above these aren't actually that expensive...I remeber the days when a 32" sony used to cost 1700 quid, now they are around the 700 mark for a bog standard set...