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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?"
Still, I have to admit that those plasma TVs look darn nice!
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.
paintball
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.
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.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
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.
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."
There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
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.
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.
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.