Just wanted to know people's thoughts on the comparison between these two, specifically on modern HDtv's.. I personally prefer the original Widescreen presentation of a laserdisc, uncropped and unformatted for a tv. I feel as though these "enhanced for Widescreen tv's" presentations (which is basically ever modern Blu-Ray and DVD) are still missing some of the intended picture, no matter how minute it might be. All in all, I think those lovely black bars make it a more organic and theatrical experience.


Any thoughts?

For a long time I watched stuff in anamorphic WS but now I just watch them in letterbox. I think the DVD player allowed you to expand it if I remember correctly. It basically part zooms part stretches the image to make it 1.78 16x9.

Yeah, that's what I had assumed. I want that full 1.85 ratio or full 2.35 ratio. I guess it's just a convenience thing since folks seem to think they are being cheated when the full widescreen picture is present.

Are you saying you prefer non-enhanced since the picture would be closer to 1.85:1 instead of 1.78:1? I would think on a 2.35:1 movie there would be no difference in amount of picture displayed.

There are a few anamorphic enhanced LDs (called Squeeze LDs). I own Terminator 2 and the picture quality is noticeably better than any other disc I've watched.

In pictures => http://www.lddb.com/help_ratio.php#squeeze

Julien

With 1.85, it's not as much information lost, but 2.35 I'd definitely want 2.35 and not anamorphic. I think it's been at least 5 years since I've seen anything anamorphic and I don't miss it. It stretches the image very bad and crops the sides equally as bad.

I don't quite understand that comment. A 2.35:1 movie should have the same picture dimensions whether it's enhanced for widescreen TVs or not. There shouldn't be any stretching or cropping. An anamorphically enhanced 2.35:1 movie will still have the same black bars on the top and bottom as the one that's not enhanced.

Not exactly. The anamorphed image stretch-out to 16:9 format is designed to allow 1.85 to fit 1.78 by slightly cropping all four sides. It would do this on 2.35 as well. The slight image loss amounts to .037 of the image on the sides.

Ah learned something new. I stand corrected.

Seems odd to do it this way though. Wouldn't it be beneficial to simply adjust the height of the top and bottom black bars to achieve the correct aspect ratio without losing any picture at all?

Fight Club and T2 are Super35 only STAR WARS is true anamorphic scope. Portions of FC and T2 may vary from different pressings?

Of course it would to those of us who are interested in the aesthetic aspects of films, which are not the commercial interests who sell product for home viewing nor the US general public. That same general public, which I will label as GP for short, practically had to be dragged into the world of widescreen TV thanks to pressure by LD fans who enjoy widescreen and the Japanese public who wanted widescreen HD asap.

I mean, why else would TV manufacturers ever make a 4:3 HD television except to foist it on the US GP already used to 4:3 because they don't like black bars! I stated this before in another thread, the US GP thinks that if they see black bars anywhere on a TV screen, somehow they are not getting their money's worth. And the commercial interests want to fill that screen with image to keep the GP satisfied.

The rallying cry of the ignorant TV viewer = No Black Bars!

I argued for 30 minutes while watching an episode of Married With Children with a friend on the original aspect ratio. He was playing it on Directv in full screen 16x9. I told him it wasn't the correct aspect ratio, it was actually 4x3, they had just expanded and zoomed the frame. He also said it was in HD which coming from 1" tape upconverted HD is the best you could get on this show.

Anyway I don't think I ever got thru to him. I played the DVD which shows it correctly but he liked the full screen better. Go figure. Some people are just clueless to how things are filmed vs how they're shown on their TV.

We personally prefer Anamorphic over Letterbox. Letterbox cropped to 16:9 resolution doesn't look horrible, but the vertical edges are a bit more blurry.

Anamorphic DVDs are designed to allow for more digital pixels to be used to store the image, it's the exact same concept as cinemascope with film (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaScope).

Whether or not a 1.85 film is changed to fit the 1.78 window, is a mastering decision, and definitely not an attribute of simply being an anamorphic dvd. Possibly you just need to adjust the overscan of your display device?

Here's a frame from "the grinch" dvd, exported directly from the dvd using ffmpeg. it's a 1.85:1 anamorphic dvd, and has black bars on top and bottom, as it should.

I barley notice the back bars on my blu-rays