Ok... so I've been shopping for some movies lately and it seems like +75% of all the titles I saw were marked as widescreen.

The thing I don't understand is... why would people want to buy these widescreen Products when it renders 40% of your TV's viewing dimensions worthless? You might as well buy a TV half the size and try very hard to find full screen editions of the movies/tv shows that you want to watch. Seriously what is peoples fascination with two huge black bars on the top and bottom of their screen?... It just makes no sense to me.

/rant

Because widescreen is standard now? I don't think you can even buy a 4:3 tv anymore.

I think it has more to do with the movie companies being too lazy to reformat the movie to fit a regular TV. So they put huge black bars there instead. If you have an HDTV you can probably turn the picture mode to "zoom" in the options menu and it will help make the picture larger. It annoys me too, but the zoom mode usually fixes that.

Movies are filmed in widescreen format. When you watch a fullscreen movie they have actually cut off the extreme left and right sides of the picture. Then there is the awful Pan&Scan movies where they shift the picture left and right while you are watching so that you get to see what's happening in the whole scene. In short you get less screen use but more picture with widescreen.

Cinemas show stuff in widescreen, so making a 4:3 version of a film would a) be a lot of extra work (basically having to film everything twice, if they want to do it right) and B) detract from the quality of the DVD version, since cinematography would be screwed up on the 4:3 version due to it being put together with widescreen ratios in mind.

Solution to your black bars: get a modern TV with a 16:9 or 16:10 ratio .

Take it up with film studios who use a variety of aspect ratios (depending on the "vision" the director has). Either you're not using all the screen on your HDTV or you lose a good chunk of the film (and degrade the image quality/sharpness) with a full screen edition of a movie shot in widescreen. The only time it works out with an HDTV is when its filmed in 1.85:1 to begin with.

I don't understand why you would want full screen. The edges of the picture are cut off. You're losing sometimes half of the picture you'd've gotten with a widescreen version.

1. You view in widescreen, not fullscreen, as your eyes are on the side of each other, giving you more field of vision on your sides than on top/bottom

2. Films have ALWAYS been filmed in widescreen. A technique called Pan & Scan was used to fit it on fullscreen TVs. Watching a movie in fullscreen means actually missing out on stuff.

3. If your screen is widecreen*, then you don't get the black bars. Most people have widescreens nowadays.

*This is assuming your TV has the same widescreen resolution as the material in question.

Aside from the widescreen format being the format of film, there's also the reason that is. As a human we see farther left and right than we do up and down, so we basically see in widescreen. It seems a pretty natural choice then.

Besides, from an artistic standpoint, I've seen the most beautifully composed shots be destroyed by being cut-off into the standard box format.

Edit: totally ninja'd..

Bah, what I don't like are the TV companies now assuming that we all have large screen TV's. It's nearly impossible to see the scores or scrolls on any sports events nowdays :shakefist:

My home movie viewing experience has never been negatively affected by the edges being cut off. Maybe it's cause I don't know what I'm missing? Or that I wasn't missing anything important? I can't miss that which I've never had though eh? :thumbsup:


Ah well... I can understand why this is happening now.

Thanks guys.

For some movies, I'd say that's fine. Though for the film that's been carefully put together with painstaking cinematography, making each and every shot mean something, missing near half of the image is a crime. Maybe that's just the nerd in me raging about composition though.

Randomly, I think it's rather curious how we've now almost totally moved away from 4:3 monitors whilst some camera manufacturers have decided that's just the job for their new sensors, the "four thirds" format replacing the traditional 3:2 on some models. That said, I actually quite like 16:9 on monitors and 4:3 on cameras, so, er, y'know.

As stated below... its a limitation of the tv.

Serious?
No... The film was shot widescreen, and you can't fit it on a 4:3 screen. Reformatting it loses imagery & composition from the original (or in the worst instances warps the image).
Wide screen plays beautifully on a wide format screen. :shrug:
If given the choice I always choose widescreen over the full screen version.

*Some films are extremely wide screen~like 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKnFLPV2yDY'... That's how it was filmed. The black bars on tv screens are a limitation of the TVs. :shrug:
(They are just not wide enough to show the complete image of the film, so they reduce the width to the screen's limit, and they have to keep the aspect ~so you get black / blank screen at the top & bottom).

I know, I hate widescreen. My stepdad says its because it lets you see the full cut of the film (none widescreen images have the right and left sides of the images cut off a bit) but I say why does that really even matter since all that you ever see in with that extra bit of screen is more seated extras during the restaurant scene of the movie. they main subject of movies is almost always at center view, that little extra on the sides is not worth having the whole image squashed.



you can, its just like how LED TVs are hot right now (and much more expensive) than LCD even though LED isn't really all that much more expensive or new. its what they can mark up for the most profit because people are sold into believing its the newest and most advanced thing so far. same goes for HD. HD has been around since the 80's.

Widescreen isn't just a fad. You have two eyes with a greater horizontal field of view than vertical, it is only natural.

I had a fullscreen 15" monitor for years. Two years ago I bought a widescreen 22" and I can never go back to full screen. They look so weird...and square.

Pretty much this imho since a vast majority of people have widescreen TVs right now. Instead of paying to convert it into the standard ratio they just ignore it and go with the widescreen version. It wasn't until this year that I finally got rid of my 36" JVC oldschool standard TV and upgraded to a nice shiny 47" LCD TV with VGA port, 4 HDMI ports, Cable Input, etc... .

They aren't just popular "right now," they're here to stay. I haven't seen anybody selling new CRTelevisions in a few years now. Like it or not, everyone is moving towards wide-screen TVs nowadays. They're damn cheap now, too. You can get a good enough (Say "30) sized one for $300.

This. I found widescreen pretty weird at first, but now that i've used it for several years i'll never get anything with 4:3 screen again. I had to spend last weekend with 4:3 screens, and coming back to my 16:9 screens was quite liberating

I always thought the same about widescreen, until I actually got one for myself. Now, I could never go back to a fullscreen monitor, they look so alien to me. As for movies, they are originally shot in widescreen so when they make a fullscreen version it changes the director's original vision for the film. The black bars really used to bother me, and still do to some extent, but I'm able to ignore them now.

:lmao: - you could not be further from the truth.

the complete image of the film is whatever aspect ratio it was filmed in....for cinemas.

if you watch the pan and scan 4:3 version (which every film distribution company already makes in order to sell the film to countries where that is the only format for television), then you are missing not only the sides of the image (very different visual experience from what the director intended, for example, sometimes if there are two people in the frame, the pan&scan must focus on only one person, etc.), but with a 1920x1080 video master you get over 2 million pixels for each frame, vs. 314,000 pixels for a 648x486 NTSC video master, for example.

99% of feature films are shot either in 2.35:1 or 1.85:1 aspect ratiio. 1.85:1 is pretty close to 16x9 format televisions (which are 1.78:1), so you still lose a little bit of the visual image, but not much, when the video master is formatted for 16x9.

If studios butchered blu-ray versions of 2.35:1 films by cutting out the visual image to force them to fit 16x9, there would be an uproar and such a blu-ray would get horrible reviews. The only sensible option is to release those films letterboxed, so that people with 16x9 displays can still see all of the visual image from the film. 2.35:1 can only be viewed in its full glory if you have an anamorphic lens for your HD projector, in which case it looks gorgeous.

:huh: You seem a bit confused.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Liquid_crystal_display are a technology which produces an image. However, they only do the image, they don't make any light. So to be able to actually see what they're displaying, you need a lightsource. Most commonly this is done by a backlight (a light sitting behind the actual LCD, which shines said light through it). For quite a while, fluorescent lights were used, but https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Led are now replacing them, due to various benefits such as lower power consumption, better quality light, lower weight, and a smaller profile.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Oled displays are a technology with some potential, though they are still a bit young. They're already being used in some mobile phones and things, due to being even light and having an even slimmer profile than LCD's. It is currently difficult to make them in lager sizes, so it'll be a while before they have more than a token presence among monitors and TV's.




Jumping topics a bit, I'm kinda sad that SED is basically dead .

Actually, all T.V is filmed in wide screen, and always has been. It was originally converted to 'square' screens after being filmed. Keeping it as wide screen allows for better quality because it hasn't been reformatted.

The problem is, many stations still convert their broadcasting to 'square' screens, and so widescreens seem stretched and the quality is even worse if you set it to fill the whole screen.

Or they do that weird thing where they copy the pixels from around the edge, and then blur it, instead of just using black bars.