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The problem with the 4:3 restriction on iFixit.

Hello, iFixit. As of late I have seemed to find the 4:3 restriction annoying as of late. It really seemed to hit home when I tried to work on, which was the guide on the repasting of the X53E. Note I need to get a hard drive for it now, so I need to suspend further work right now. So for now, I'll simply explain why I have trouble making it work. You can find the guide here if you wish to see it as is.

I have been trying to improve this for a while, but even after many attempts I still seem to have trouble. I attribute this to the 4:3 restriction most of the time. The problems with the 4:3 restriction are as follows.

  • I need to make multiple steps just to do most actions a lot of the time. This means the guide is longer then it probably should be.
  • I have also noticed I have to crop my images just to use them at times. This gets annoying as I need to either recycle the same image twice or take two to compensate. Very, very annoying.
  • My guide quality also tends to suffer in many cases. Skip to step 6. In order to make the bottom of the laptop where all of my screws are in this laptop I had to zoom out so far, that I had to sacrifice quality just to make that shot happen. Mayer has even complained about this step too because I had to do it.
  • The cropping tool here sucks. One of the reasons I avoid it as much as possible is it's that bad and quite frankly, there's no way to get as much crop control as I'd like. This also messes with the quality of the guides. It would be nice if I could just juse use 16:9 images and make it easier.
  • If you're working with a 16:10 or 16:9 laptop(all new laptops made now tend to be 16:9) then this aspect ratio causes more problems then I care to admit. This just makes guides *harder* to make unless you're fixing a 4:3 laptop like some D630's and D520's, maybe even the D620. The format doesn't work otherwise.

Is there some way to add 16:9 support to the mix? It doesn't seem that hard to me. All you really need to do for 4:3 tablets and monitors is put black bars on. Shouldn't be that hard and if it bothers people, then offer a 16:9 and a 4:3 option.

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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I hear you, and I want to improve the image cropping experience.

Right now we've got our hands full with the new Answers design and some more markup options. But I'd like to improve our handling of odd-aspect images soon thereafter. Thanks for the feedback, and bear with us for a little while!

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Nick will be eternally grateful.