Comparing the two, my old washed out VHS to the new DVD, the supposed 16x9 widescreen is only letterboxed P&S. They've chopped the full screen to make it "Widescreen". I was hoping for a real Widescreen. Dissapointing. The new DVD is good otherwise.

no, the versions youve been watching are open matte transfers, for the widescreen version, they just put "mattes" (the black bars) on the top and bottom. The current presintation is how it looked in theaters. Not all but most 1:85:1 transfers are matted just like I mentioned.

Cogliostro,

I would suggest that you do a search on Google for "open matte"... it will explain the process by which this movie was filmed.

The DVD is presenting it properly, exactly as it was show in theaters. I see nothing disappointing about that.

Current "unmatted" transfers also zoom-in to hide boom mikes and other stuff you're not supposed to see though.

You've been deceived by the widescreen advocates who claim that the widescreen image automatically has more picture than non-widescreen images.

There are essentially three ways widescreen movies are made.

One involves shooting with anamorphic lenses, for an a final image of 2.35:1. In order to make a 4:3 image of this, it must be truly pan and scanned, with a large portion of the image cut off. Examples of this include "Star Wars," "Boogie Nights," "Alien," and "Pulp Fiction."

Another is shooting flat for a 1.85:1 image. This involves shooting onto either 16mm or 35mm film for an actual film image of 1.37:1. This is then matted -- the top and bottom of the image are masked off -- by the projectionist to extract a final image that is 1.85:1. Pretty much every 1.85:1 movie is made this way. When they are transferred to home video, they are usually released unmatted with the full 1.37:1 image exposed. Occasionally, they will have to zoom in to remove boom mikes, or for certain special effects shots. And sometimes, when these movies are made, the image is hard-matted, meaning there is no extra image available on the negative. In this latter case, the 1.85:1 image would need to be cropped at the sides to make a 4:3 image.

The third way movies are shot is Super-35. This is similar to the soft-matting of 1.85:1 movies, except it is used to (generally) make 2.35:1 movies. A Super-35 movie, when transferred to 4:3, will show more image at the top and/or bottom of the frame, with slight cropping at the edges. Examples of this process include "Fellowship of the Ring," "Terminator 2," and "Harry Potter."

At any rate, whether or not the full-frame image has more or less image available, the movies were most likely framed with the widescreen aspect ratio in mind. So when you see it in widescreen, that's the proper shape of the image, with the intended amount of visual information.

Haha, speaking of cropping a pan and scan presentation, you guys should try it, it's great fun.....

Catch Die Hard on your widescreen set whenever it's on TNT, and zoom it. My god, what a disaster.

Thanks for enlightening him Josh.

Bwahaaha!

I bet anything that this guy is gonna go nuts in choosing which version to watch now.