Widescreen (Finally) Winning

Yort writes "There's a little blurb over at the IMDB about customers at Blockbuster now generally preferring the widescreen, or letterbox, format over full-screen. This after Blockbuster tried to only stock full screen versions of movies a few years ago. I guess now the wife will have to let me buy that new widescreen TV, right?"

Comments

It is a superior format

[revmoo]

Widescreen is undeniably a lot better way to watch a movie, and I'm sure that TV makers like it, because no one wants to watch a widescreen movie on a small TV

I think it will be really nice in a few years when widescreen TV's are the norm.

Re:It is a superior format

[gilesjuk]

Only because film makers shoot in widescreen, they haven't always. It was a gimmic to stop the decline of the cinema when TVs became popular.

Perhaps they will revert to a squarer image when all TVs are widescreen?

Widescreen is popular in the UK, go into an electrical store and you'll see rows of big widescreen TVs and only a handful of 4:3 tube sets.

Problem is the UK sets aren't HD yet and are unlikely to be for many years.

Re:It is a superior format

[mwolff]

I saw a short clip on letterbox vs. full on Turner Classic movies. I was shocked at how much was lost when it was converted from the original format to the full screen format. Entire characters would disappear sometimes. Since then I have only watched letterbox. It is the way the director intended you to view it.

Widescreen

[obotics]

The problem with widescreen at the moment is that TV is not broadcasted in widescreen. This means that quite a lot of your $10,000 TV is not being used when watching regular broadcast tv. Granted, I love widescreen for movies, but I also would like to see televion broadcasts switch over.

Still, I have to admit that those plasma TVs look darn nice!

HD tv

[mjdth]

isn't HD tv's native format widescreen? wouldn't this help to get every type of TV media on the same page?

That depends...

[raehl]

SOME TV is not broadcast in wide screen. Some is. I'm pretty sure all of the late-night shows are filmed in wide screen now for example.

Now, whether the broadcaster in your area is broadcasting that wide-screen signal, or your cable provider is carrying it, is another matter entirely.

Ok, so we're half way there

[decarelbitter]

Because most modern movies are recorded in Cinemascope, which is not 16:9, but 2.35:1. So cool movies like LOTR still have a nice black bar on the top and bottom when viewed on a Shiny! 16:9 plasma screen.

Wide vs Full

[Masem]

I realize that to provide both a widescreen and a fullscreen version, with 5.1 sound and little encoding artifacts, would generally require a second disk for most feature films, I don't understand the trend currently for many newer movies to have separate boxes for Wide and Full, particularly when the version info is not easy to pick out (Now whenever I get a DVD, I doublecheck the back of the box to get all the formatting information to make sure it's what I expect). The old Warner DVD titles were flippies in that one side was full, the other wide, but this means you didn't have a picture on the DVD media itself (oh, boo hoo!). It would seem to me that providing both versions of the movie on a flippy disk in one box would be cheaper than making up two distribution runs, particularly when the number of full vs. wide is still rapidly changing.

Explanation is Simple

[tabdelgawad]

With decent (not great!) 27" TVs dipping below $200, the median size of TVs in US households must be significantly higher than it was a few years ago. This tends to resolve the tradeoff between letterbox and fullscreen in favor of letterbox.

Re:How?!

[farnsworth]

How the hell are you supposed to watch Kubrick

Kubrick typically prints the entire film negative, giving you a 4:3 aspect ratio, i.e., "not widescreen". Almost everyone else cuts off the top and bottom of the film to give you 16:9.

You make a good point, but keep in mind that "what the director intended you to see" does not always mean "widescreen."

Re:Do Not Underestimate Customers

[_|()|\|]

I remember buying American Beauty last year on VHS, as a gift for my sister. The clerk asked me 3 times whether I was sure I wanted widescreen.

You have to admit that wide-screen VHS is a small market. Wide-screen anamorphic DVD is popular because it displays at a high resolution on a decent TV. Wide-screen VHS looks bad on any TV.

Re:Upgrading

[darkov]

No, that's to cater to the sucker mentality that letterbox=elite (as is evidenced throughout this thread): When a show or commercial wants to seem classy or refined, here comes the letterbox!

To a degree, but It can be valid, if I were shooting in a HD aspect ratio I'd probably be pretty frustrated to find that my shots ended up looking crappy in the narrow aspect. Good composition would be very difficult (if not impossible) to achive for both aspects at the same time.

But then again, we are talking about TV, not high art.

This is the same Blockbuster that edits content

[gad_zuki!]

Great, now I can watched widescreen NC-17 and other films edited by the studio for "family-friendly" stores like Blockbuster and Walmart because these stores will refuse to carry content they find religiously/morally questionable. The studios don't want to lose money so there goes the penis scene from Bad Lieutenant. I can't remember any others from the top of my head, but the editing is quite real.

They need to widen their tolerance not their aspect ratios.