Please, explain to me the big deal of getting anamorphic and what the difference is. My rear projuection TV is 4:3 and I think it has so thing to do with aspect ratio but I have doubts that I am correct.

By the way, I want to get the Rocky set and I was wondering if it is worth the investment. I am starting to be a little more thrifty and save money by shopping for my DVDs on the internet and using coupons. I have 216 DVDs now and would like to be at 300 by Christmas.

I wish I could find my links to help you learn about anamorphic (I'll abbreviate as 'ana') vs. non-anamorphic ('non-ana'). There is discussion about the merits of either related to your needs. Anyone who tells you that anamorphic is better is technically right. But for many people, their viewing habits are such that it doesn't matter.

If you have or ever plan on buying a 16:9 Widescreen TV or projector, then it's in your interest to make sure all your DVDs are ana.

When you watch a movie where the entire TV screen is filled with the picture (Pan & Scan or Full Frame), you are using every single horizontal line of resolution on the screen to show you the picture. When you watch a widescreen movie on your TV screen, there are black bars at the top and bottom. So, the horizontal lines in the black area are being wasted. They are not being used to show you the image of the movie. The middle part of the screen is showing you the movie... and so there are a fewer number of horizontal lines showing you the picture. Not a big deal on a small set, but on bigger sets, this lower resolution means lower picture quality.

So what ana DVDs do is they squish the picture horizontally. Hold your two hands up to the sides of your monitor. Now try to squish it (as if you were clapping your hands together) and you'll see what I mean. This forces a widescreen image to use all of the horizontal lines of resolution that the TV has. But if you were to try and watch the movie this way on your 4:3 set everyone would look like they'd been squished skinny and stretched tall. A 16:9 TV set takes this squished image and stretches it back out (so that it fills up the extra wide screen). Now people are regular shape and regular height on the screen and you are using the most lines of resolution possible. You get a sharper, cleaner picture.

On 4:3 (standard) TV sets, an ana DVD is unsquished and displayed in the proper ratio (no skinny people) through a complicated process called 3:2 pulldown.

Since many serious fans of home theater have 16:9 screens and because there seems to be a growing trend in that direction for TVs in the future, DVDs are released anamorphically to take advantage of that and present the movie in the best quality possible.

I don't have a 16:9 set... but I see one in my future. So I insist that all my DVDs are anamorphic. This is why I haven't purchased Titanic, and many early Buena Vista and Fox releases. But to the casual viewer, this stuff doesn't matter.

Great explanation. I just wanted to point out that you probably meant "anamorphic downconversion" instead of 3:2 pulldown. Isn't 3:2 pulldown the process of converting film's 24 fps to the 30 fps of NTSC so it plays at the correct speed?

My mistake. Thanks X for correcting me on that.

3:2 pulldown is a whole different topic!

...letterbox = bad (certainly in the year 2001!...)

...anamorphic = GOOD (in an ideal world, all movies with AR starting at 1.66:1 and wider [1.85:1, 2.0:1, etc.] should receive an anamorphic transfer to DVD...)

For an explanation of anamorphic vs. letterbox go here:

http://www.dvdweb.co.uk/information/anamorphic.htm

. . . ! ! ! . . .

I'd also like to add that by making an anamorphic transfer, you are almost gauranteed a new transfer of the film. This alone can be an improvement even if you can't take advantage of the extra resolution.

I think that this is something you found out sometime before you accumulated 216 DVDs, but hopefully, you don't have too many inferior discs, and if so they're of movies you really, really like.

rb-

Someday you will own a 16:9 television or projector. It will happen. Keep that in mind.

Some interesting Sites:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articl...hic/index.html

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/editorial/bz100298.html

http://gregl.net/videophile/anamorphic.htm

http://www.smr-home-theatre.org/anam...namorphic.html

http://members.accessus.net/~090/awh/16x9.html#intro

There should be plenty of others, but these should serve to help explain the benefits. And the last one will come in handy if you have Sony TV and want to try the squeeze trick.

Closing thread. In addition to what's been posted in this thread, if you perform a search for this subject in the DVD Talk forum, you'll find several results, including at least one recent thread. Please continue discussion there.

--Heather
DVD Reviews moderator