16:10 Aspect Ratio Calculator

What Is the 16:10 Aspect Ratio?

The 16:10 aspect ratio - spoken as "sixteen by ten" - means the image is 16 units wide for every 10 units tall. Simplify the fraction and you get 8:5, or as a decimal, 1.6:1. It's easy to confuse with 16:9 because the numbers look similar, but the two ratios are visibly different once you put them side by side. At the same width, a 16:10 screen is about 11% taller than a 16:9 screen.

That extra height matters more than it sounds like it should. Video, games, and most streaming content are mastered in 16:9, but documents, spreadsheets, code, and web pages are all taller than they are wide in how people actually scroll through them. 16:10 gives you room for one or two more lines of text, one more row of a spreadsheet, or a taskbar and toolbar without eating into the content area. That's the entire reason it exists as a category separate from 16:9.

1.6:1 is also notable because it sits very close to the golden ratio, roughly 1.618:1, a proportion long associated with balanced, pleasing composition in art and design. It's not why manufacturers chose it, but it's part of why 16:10 screens are often described as looking more "natural" than the wider, shorter 16:9 shape. If you're new to the concept, our guide to what aspect ratio means covers the basics.

Where 16:10 Gets Used

Laptops: This is where 16:10 matters most today. Apple's entire current MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lineup uses 16:10 panels, a deliberate return to the ratio after over a decade of 16:9 MacBooks. Dell's XPS 13, 14, and 16 have used 16:10 since 2020. Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon switched to 16:10 starting with its 9th generation in 2021, and HP's Spectre and Envy lines have followed the same shift. The pitch is consistent across all of them: more vertical space for the browser tabs, terminal windows, and documents that people actually spend their day looking at.

Professional and Productivity Monitors: Before 16:10 became a laptop trend again, it never fully disappeared from the desktop monitor world. Color-critical monitors from brands like Eizo and some professional lines from Dell's UltraSharp series have long favored 16:10 for photo editing, video color grading, and CAD work, where the extra vertical pixels help when palettes and toolbars stack up along the edges of the screen.

Tablets: Many Android tablets, including several Samsung Galaxy Tab models, use 16:10 rather than the 4:3 ratio Apple uses for the iPad. It's a middle ground: wide enough for video, tall enough that portrait-mode reading and browsing doesn't feel as cramped as it would on a 16:9 panel.

One thing worth noting: 16:10 is not the same as the even taller 3:2 ratio used by devices like the Microsoft Surface Laptop and Surface Pro. 3:2 (1.5:1) goes further in the same direction, trading even more width for height. If 16:10 is the middle-ground productivity ratio, 3:2 is the ratio for people who want a laptop screen to behave more like a sheet of paper.

Common 16:10 Resolutions

These are the most widely used 16:10 resolutions across laptops, monitors, and tablets.

The Rise, Fall, and Return of 16:10

16:10 was the default laptop and monitor ratio through most of the 2000s. Apple's PowerBook and early MacBook Pro lines used it, and so did the majority of Dell, HP, and Lenovo laptops of that era. It was seen as the practical middle ground: wide enough for the emerging widescreen video format, tall enough to still feel comfortable for spreadsheets and word processing.

That changed fast between 2008 and 2010. Panel manufacturers realized that 16:9 displays could be cut from the exact same glass sheets used to produce television panels, since HDTV had already standardized on 16:9. Making laptop and monitor screens in that same ratio meant using existing TV production lines instead of a separate process, which lowered manufacturing costs significantly. Within about two years, 16:10 largely vanished from mainstream laptops and monitors, replaced almost entirely by 16:9. The move was widely unpopular with people who used their computers for work, since it quietly shrank the usable vertical space on every new machine they bought.

The pendulum swung back starting around 2020. Apple's move to 16:10 across its whole MacBook lineup, alongside similar decisions from Dell and Lenovo on their flagship business laptops, reflected a shift in how people actually use these devices: increasingly as their only computer, for everything from spreadsheets to video calls to code, rather than as a secondary machine paired with a big external monitor. The extra vertical space stopped being a nice-to-have and became a selling point again.

16:10 Compared to Other Aspect Ratios

16:10 vs 16:9: At the same 1920-pixel width, 16:10 gives you 1200 pixels of height versus 1080 for 16:9, about 11% more vertical space. Video and games are still made for 16:9, so 16:10 screens typically show a thin black bar above and below full-screen 16:9 video, or the video app crops slightly to fill the frame. For everyday work like browsing, writing, and coding, most people find the extra height worth that small tradeoff.

16:10 vs 3:2: The 3:2 ratio used by Microsoft's Surface line and some Android tablets goes even further toward height, at 1.5:1 versus 1.6:1 for 16:10. A 3:2 screen looks noticeably closer to a sheet of paper. It's popular for note-taking and reading-heavy work, but it shows more letterboxing than 16:10 when watching 16:9 video.

16:10 vs 4:3: The older 4:3 ratio (1.33:1), still used by the iPad, is considerably more square than 16:10. It maximizes vertical space at the cost of feeling narrow for anything widescreen, which is part of why 4:3 never returned to laptops and monitors the way 16:10 and 3:2 did.

16:10 vs 5:4: The 5:4 ratio (1.25:1) is taller still and mostly associated with older LCD monitors and certain print formats today. 16:10 sits between 5:4 and 16:9, which is exactly why it became the compromise ratio of choice for laptop makers trying to satisfy both video viewing and productivity work on the same screen.

Frequently Asked Questions

Related Guides

• 16:9 Aspect Ratio Calculator - the widescreen standard for video and most monitors
• 3:2 Aspect Ratio Calculator - the taller ratio used by Surface devices and DSLR cameras
• Pixel Density Calculator - PPI for Retina and high-DPI laptop screens
• Wallpaper & Desktop Background Sizes - matching wallpaper dimensions to your screen ratio