I just read that even with a widescreen tv, you will still get blackbars on the top and bottom when watching DVDs in 2:35 format. What about anamorphic DVDs? Will you also get the black bars?

If they are 2.35:1 and anamorphic, yes.

But the Black bars wont be near as close to the size of the ones you see when watching a 2.35:1 on a 4:3... Not even close, much less distracting

You have to think about the ratio of your viewing device vs. the ratio of what's being viewed.

A regular TV is 1.33:1, that's why you need black bars for things that are NOT 1.33:1.

Your widescreen TV is 1.78:1. So anything that is not in that ratio will need bars (1.33:1 stuff will need 'em on the sides; 2.35:1 stuff will need them on the top).

so what benefits does anamorphic or "enhanced for widescreen" give you?

Increased resolution.

This article may help clear things up for you:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/

Ripped from the DVDHardware FAQ.

No...surely not...still getting black bars on a 2.35:1 ratio on a TV that's 1.78:1 ratio? Who would've guessed?

Being a senior member here, you're just now figuring this out?

Anything that's not 1.78 (16:9), you're gonna get black bars, albeit much smaller than you'd get on a 1.33 (4:3) TV.

Why what did you think, that because the movie says, "enhanced for widescreen TVs" that it's always gonna fit it perfectly?

You still have to fit the widescreen image on a screen that doesn't always match the ratio of the image.

Anamorphic only pre-stretches the image vertically by adding some additional lines of resolution bringing the widescreen image up to the full 480p resolution. Non-anamorphic titles have 480 lines, but the black bars are a part of those 480 lines. In anamorphic mode, the black bars are generated by the player.

I think I got that right, someone please correct me if I'm wrong on that.

You're correct except that movies wider than 1.78:1 won't use the full 480 lines for picture information. Some black space will be left over, which accounts for the narrow black bars that are visible with 2.35:1 movies on a 16:9 display.

Well yeah, I knew that but didn't know how to put it. 1.85 and 2.35 anamorphic movies have some of the 480 res within the black bars. But not nearly as much 480 info as a non-anamorphic disc.

Consider a 2.35 film, won't the anamorphic version end up cutting some of the sides in order to fit on a 1.78 widscreen TV? I mean if the black lines get thinner going from 2.35 non-anamorphic to 2.35 anamorphic, won't the sides of the image be slightly chopped off in order to prevent the image from being stretched vertically?

No, no and no.

Click on either of the links posted above. They tell you everything you want to know.

"Black bars" are distracting? That's news to me...

Wow, I know some people that must have struggled with high school geometry.


And jmj713 is right... I don't think I've been 'distracted' by letterbox bars since the early 1990s, when they became commonplace on laserdiscs. You get used to them pretty quickly. I can't ever picture being distracted by the tiny ones you'd get viewing 2.35:1 material on a 16x9 display.

I remember watching my first widescreen LD on a 27"...talk about squinting!

I saved up and got my first big screen, a Mit. 55" analog. I thought I died and went to heaven.

Now, I have a Mit. 65" 16x9 and am living happily ever after...life is good!

Just to throw in my useless two cents on this ever endless topic, I'm not sure what the big deal is about the black bars, in and of themselves either. To wit:

If you were to watch films in the theater with the lights up, you would usually see "black bars" in as much as the ratio of the film projection rarely matches the dimensions of the screen. By the same token, if you were to watch movies at home on your TV in a darkened room with the lights turned off, the "black bars" would also, essentially "disappear" - well, assuming the room was dark enough. My point being that the experiences are essentially identical insofar as the existence of the space extraneous to the film image itself.

On the other hand, watching a 2:35:1 AR film on a 20" 4:3 AR TV is a pretty daunting experience. However, the problem is not that the "black bars" exist, but rather that the image on the viewing screen is so small. I believe the real resistance to OAR (from those who do resist it) stems not from the "distraction" created by the "black bars", but rather from the belief, real or imagined ( okay, usually real on the average <50" home display) that the image is "shrunken" and therefore harder to see.

Hence, my rather longwinded assertion is that if most home video displays were in very large format (ie - 50" and above), the J6P complaints and resistance to widescreen OAR would desist.

Well, it's a theory, anyway...