Hello. I'm in the process of searching for a new PC notebook (I'm in the market for a 17 to 18 inch display), and I've come across a couple laptops that mention having an "extra-wide" display or a "130-degree ultra-wide viewing angle" and things to that effect. I wanted to ask some questions about this:

1.) Does this extra-wide display entail a better picture or resolution or something like that, or is it just wider?

2.) Will an extra-wide display like this make widescreen bars (the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen when watching a movie) more likely? Will the wider display cause these bars to be bigger or appear more often on movies (or games or anything else) where they wouldn't have on a regular width display?

My computer will have a 17-18 inch display, it will be 1080p, and will be Blu-ray enabled. I'm very concerned with getting the best picture possible, so I'd like to know if the extra-wide display will contribute to that, but I'm also heavily annoyed by widescreen bars at the top and bottom of my movies and whatnot, so if the primary effect of the extra-wide display is simply a wider screen that will have more bars more often, then I'd like to know that.

Any help here is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

It really depends as much on the graphics card as the screen itself, and there is no reliable way to know. You have to see it setup and play with the display settings.
However, If you select a true high end laptop should be fine. Others will make the images look stretched, but user quickly get used to it. One would think that 1080p would be a guarantee of good screen performance, but it is not.
If you are getting a computer that is in the upper third of its price and model range, you usually get the good screen combination in my experience... HP, Dell, Sony, and Lenovo anyway. You will have to avoid budget laptops.

Okay. Well, the PC notebook I'm getting will either be Vaio or HP, and it will be pretty high-end. If I bought one with a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GT 130M graphics card and an 18" ultra-wide 1080p display, does anyone know if this setup would be more likely to produce bigger widescreen bars on movies/games than would be produced by the same setup with a non-ultra-wide display? In other words, is the ultra-wide display definitely a good thing, or can it have side effects like bars at the to and bottom of the screen?