Macforth wrote:
But it assumes a widescreen spect ration of 16:9. I am surprised as it is describes as a perfect gamers screen......not a screen for watching 1080p vids. If the aspect ratio had been chosen as 16:10, I would certainly have been interested.
I am in no way involved with product development, but I can tell you that a 16:10 aspect ratio display panel would have been significantly more expensive. With 1080p being the "official" top end of TV resolutions, at least until 4K and 8K standards start making their way into the mainstream, it has become kind of the unofficial standard for monitors as well. The reason for this is rather simple, and it has to do with there being a lot of companies set up to manufacture 1080p panels, not so many set up to manufacture "odd" resolution displays like 1920x1200 for a 19:10 aspect ratio. So you'd have to pay some manufacturer like LG or Samsung enough to make it worth their while to devote capacity away from 16:9 panels. That would then be passed onto you, the consumer, in the form of a higher retail price.
So that almost certainly put the likely price point beyond what the people involved in new product development figured would be enough to make it worth the while to develop the product. You might be interested in buying one, but if Asus only made one unit, the cost would be probably tens of thousands of dollars. Even if it were just thousands of dollars, would you pay that? Probably not. You need to make a few million units to get the price point per unit to a few hundred dollars where people may consider paying for it. More people are going to be interested in buying the monitor the lower the price point, then factoring in the desire for Asus to make a profit and not have a warehouse full of inventory it can't move (think HP's TouchPad tablet before the fire sale, where Best Buy was reportedly telling HP to take back a bunch of inventory), certain compromises have to be made.
It ultimately comes down to cold hard numbers. The numbers for a 16:10 aspect ratio unit didn't pencil out where a 16:9 aspect ratio did. At least if we go off of my basic analysis, which I would again state is based off of absolutely no special insider knowledge. Just pulling together a lot of universals that apply to all businesses.