Picture heights for 4:3 and 16:9

[ppppenguin]

It's easy to see that a wide screen TV must have a bigger diagonal to give the same picture height as an old style 4:3 set. I finally sat down and did the sums to see how much. It's no more than pythagorus. The answer is that a 16:9 wide screen needs to have a 22.4% greater diagonal to give the same picture heiight as a 4:3. So to a decent approximation a 32" WS set has the same height as a 26" 4:3. About 15.6" in each case.

This breaks down if you try to compare between CRT and flat panel sets. With CRTs a certain amount of the nominal diagonal is hidden by the mask. The exact amount varies but an inch is a good starting point. With flat panels you see the entire nominal size.

So if you had a 26" 4:3 CRT TV you'd need a 30" to 32" 16:9 flat panel to give the same picture height.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Thanks for that Jeffrey. The earlier 21 inch tubes though were quite "bulbous" and if you measure middle top to bottom the difference between them and a 25 inch is marginal.
Later tubes had squarer corners and were less bulbous so the the "middle height" of the screen was less pro rata to the diagonal screen size.

[Mike Watterson]

I've always told people upgrading from 4:3 (or even 16:9 CRT), measure height of actual picture and take tape measure to showroom. (Most non-technical people can't do the sums). Then get bigger, never the same size.

Use the same tape measure, as unbelievably some are wrong!

I think in the latter years of CRT they were supposed to quote visible picture diagonal and not CRT size.

Oddly clothes sizes are now useless. You need to measure your neck, shoulders, chest (or if female bust and chest underbust), waist, hips, arm (on inseam), leg (on inseam) and possibly thigh. Shoes / boots / slippers need to be tried on both feet (one foot is usually larger and both halves of the pair may not be exactly the same). Many clothes places don't have changing facilities. This is all apart from US sizes much smaller for clothes or shoes than UK numbers. Asian S M L is often XXS, SX and S!

Recipes on Internet may not specify source country. USA has a baking cup, a coffee cup and some other cup, none of which match the UK baking cup measure. The Japanese have a different cup measure.

Different styles of jeans in same shop have proved to be completely different.

Really everything needs measured. Even tape measures (my wife managed to buy a tape measure that had some sort of imaginary inches or cm, I forget which). I found blinds were not the stated width.

[Terry]

USA has a baking cup, a coffee cup and some other cup, none of which match the UK baking cup measure.

So long as you use the same measure for all the ingredients, the only thing which will vary is the final size. 

As far as I know, only one cup size is used for recipes in the US, and the measures are widely available.

My wife first encountered the concept of measuring in cups when she bought an American book of bread making recipes. She thinks its a wonderful idea as it does away with all the complications of UK recipes. Everything is measured in cups (and fractions thereof, for which there are also measures available) rather than chopping and changing between, say, grammes or ounces for flour, fluid ounces of water, teaspoons of yeast and so on.

Not that I know much about it (!) but following a UK recipe must be like building a box which is 1½ yards long by 75 cm wide by 1 foot 9⅝ inches deep ...

[ppppenguin]

I agree that the US measuring cups are excellent. They are universally used over there and readily available as sets. Shame the oven temperature will be in Fahrenheit. I don't know if they have a gas mark scale like the UK.

[Mike Watterson]

Cups are daft for dry measures. Only useful for liquids. Americans are baffled the rest of the world weighs yarn, and then they discover it works.

It's important to not mix measurement systems, or round too much. Also to understand what the originator means in terms of egg sizes. My wife now checks weight of eggs on tricky recipes when they are working, but OTH she is a mathematician and computer programmer!