Originally Posted by joliom (Post 11583831)

Or are 4:3 films just displayed at a lower resolution on 16:9 monitors with some of the lines of resolution devoted to the black bars on the sides (sort of the letterboxing process in reverse)?

Originally Posted by joltman (Post 11583886)

This, it's called pillarboxing in this case (although it's not at a lower resolution, it's still 1080 lines, it's just that some of the 1920 vertical lines are used for black bars)

Originally Posted by joltman (Post 11583886)

This, it's called pillarboxing in this case (although it's not at a lower resolution, it's still 1080 lines, it's just that some of the 1920 vertical lines are used for black bars)

Originally Posted by joliom (Post 11585479)

Well then wouldn't that mean that fullscreen movies on blu-ray are lower res than widescreen movies since a lot of those vertical lines are being used by the pillarboxes? It seems like there should be an alternate anamorphic process for blu-rays that squishes 1:33:1 images down into 1:78:1 so that all 1920 vertical lines can be exclusively devoted to the image (with the player then stretching it back out to 1:33:1 and generating the pillarboxes when displayed). Otherwise isn't it like the reverse problem of letterboxed (i.e. non-anamorphic) DVD's displayed on a 16:9 TV?

Originally Posted by joliom (Post 11585479)

Well then wouldn't that mean that fullscreen movies on blu-ray are lower res than widescreen movies since a lot of those vertical lines are being used by the pillarboxes?

Originally Posted by joliom (Post 11585479)

It seems like there should be an alternate anamorphic process for blu-rays that squishes 1:33:1 images down into 1:78:1 so that all 1920 vertical lines can be exclusively devoted to the image...

Originally Posted by joltman (Post 11585497)

The reason for anamorphic was so that with a widescreen movie would be shown with black bars on a 4:3 TV and shown 'full screen' on a 16:9 TV...

Originally Posted by Jay G. (Post 11586017)

In a sense, yes. 16:9 1080p is 1920x1080, about 2 megapixels. A 4:3 image uses 1440x1080, about 1.5 megapixels. A scope 2.40:1 film uses 1920x800, again about 1.5 megapixels. So a 1.78:1 or 16:9 image uses the most available resolution for the image.


There could be such a process, both horizontal for 4:3 and vertical for 2.40:1, but the problem would be what TV would you display it on? The maximum resolution on most consumer TVs is 1920x1080 aka 1080p, which means that in order to display 4:3 in the correct aspect ratio, the player would have to downconvert and pillarbox it as 1440x1080, which is how it's currently stored anyway. In order to received the benefits of anamorphic conversion on a Blu-ray 1080p image, you'd need a TV with a resolution higher than 1080p HD, so something like a 4K TV.

Anamorphic DVDs benefitted people with HDTVs, since 1080 and even 720 HDTVs had higher resolution than the 480 resolution of SDTVs, so the anamorphic enhancement allowed for 20% more image resolution, which when dealing with 640x480, about 0.3 megapixels, was a significant advantage.


This isn't strictly true. All WS TVs have a zoom feature, so DVDs where the WS image is letterboxed in the 4:3 frame can be zoomed in to eliminate or reduce the black bars. The problem is that since they're letterboxed in such a low resolution, they can look horrible (see the Star Wars bonus discs of the original trilogy). Anamorphic enhancement, as I explained above, allowed for better resolution on HDTVs, while not adversely affecting letterboxing on a 4:3 TV.

There was also the little-used feature of anamorphic enhancement on DVDs referred to as pan-n-scan on the fly, where instead of letterboxing an anamorphic enhanced DVD on a 4:3 TV, the player would instead zoom in on the image to a 4:3 frame, then use encoded data to pan across the image keeping the pertinent info in frame. Thus the same DVD could be used for "fullscreen" on both 4:3 and 16:9 TVs. This method was only effective for 1.78:1 images though, and studios often preferred creating separate 4:3 DVD releases, which could utilize open-matting and such so that the 4:3 version wouldn't look so terrible.
http://www.avsforum.com/t/171653/pan...n-the-dvd-spec

Originally Posted by joliom (Post 11587445)

Thanks for the explanation, Jay. It makes complete sense to me now.

Originally Posted by joliom (Post 11587445)

I guess the problem would be for folks with projector systems that utilize screens wider than the HDTV standard of 1.78:1. Without an anamorphic feature for wider aspect ratio films, they wouldn't be able to take full advantage of every blu-ray (especially films like How the West Was Won or Ben-Hur).