As someone who routinely watched 16:9 content on a 4:3 monitor, I never found the black bars an issue. I would think that adding a 60 pixel bar on top and bottom of a 1080 pixel image would be pretty insignificant.
I rarely read scanalations, but when I do I prefer rotating my 4:3 monitor 90 degrees and using my desktop software to rotate the displayed image to match.
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