About anamorphic...
 

Would ANY difference be discernable on a standard TV?
Is picture quality at all better if it's anamorphic? Thanks.

On a standard TV without a 16:9 enhancement feature, I don't think there's any discernable difference in quality (at least from my experience). If, however, your standard TV has 16:9 enhancement (Sony WEGA, etc), you'll definitely see an improvement. Still, it's a good idea to "plan ahead" by making sure your collection is anamorphic, as widescreen and enhanced standard TVs will be the norm before you know it.

The Anamorphic feature doesn't add much, but since a lot of films undergo a remaster or cleanup before anamorphic encoding, it's often the better choice. A lot of the non-anamorphic transfers are bad transfers or LD ports, both of which are outclassed by modern technology's anamorphic capabilities.

What they said. Also it looks a lot better if you watch your movie on a PC like me.

I thought I read somewhere that you actually lose a little resolution watching an anamorphic DVD on a 4x3 set (unless the set does the 16x9 squeeze). There certainly will be no inherent advantage on a 4x3 set that does not do the 16x9 squeeze. The advantage is that you'll probably get a 16x9 set someday and want anamorphic discs.

What he said. I have about a half-dozen widescreen movies that are not anamorphic (including "Once More With Feeling" on Buffy S6). Never mattered to me on my 32" set. But I can't make myself watch them now on my 57" Sony HD set. I tried zooming them to fill the screen, but that doesn't look very good at all.

Your DVD player has to convert the 16:9 content to fit your 4:3 screen, and this conversion can introduce slight defects in the picture, but it's not even worth worrying about.

Well now there may be some truth to that. We have a 32" and 36" Sony WEGA, both with of course, 16:9 Enhanced Modes. Now before I realized what that was for, (VERY quite early on in the ownership of the TVs), I think I may have watched a few DVDs in 4:3 Widescreen mode. But since discovering 16:9 Enhanced Mode, I have kept my player on 16:9 mode ever since.

But what does that have to do with the question at hand? Well, since then, I have reverted back to 4:3 WS mode just to check the difference with anamorphic discs and non-anamorphic discs. It seems that non-anamorphic discs look just as good if not better than anamorphic discs in any mode, while anamorphic discs don't look as good in 4:3 mode as they do in 16:9 mode. It's almost as if you can actually see the missing resolution when viewing an anamorphic disc in 4:3 mode.



But anyway, as a rule of thumb, ALWAYS buy anamorphic discs when possible. In fact, my collection would be quite a bit bigger, but I refuse to buy non-anamorphic discs of movies that I'd really like to have.

In the near future, and even now as we speak, most new TVs, whether 16:9 TVs or standard 4:3 TVs, have either 16:9 mode or what they call "cinematic" mode.