I was reading up on DiscoVision titles and as it turns out many are mastered simply by squeezing the film print down to 4:3. I was wondering, does this count as anamorphic widescreen?

Also, it seems stupid to me to waste such a big chunk of the picture resolution on black bars the way letterboxed releases did, why didn't Pioneer master widescreen titles anamorphically and make the players capable of shrinking the picture vertically to fit 4:3 screens?

Because 16/9 screens didn't exist when LD was created and most people were happy with Pan & Scan to fill up their screens.

Later the "Squeezed" LDs provided a way to stretch 4:3 to 16:9.

=> https://www.lddb.com/help/ratio/

Julien

He means, “Why didn’t LDs use a 16:9 enhanced mode?” Some specific combinations of DVD players and TVs of their era did do this (2000 or so). With the DVD version your TV simply doesn’t draw anything where the black bars are and spends all the resolution between them on the image where it should be. It takes a stretched image and squeezes the full resolution into a letterboxed 4:3 screen. It died when progressive scan became normal, then wide screen, then HDMI.

The main reason why it wasn’t done with LD is timing. With nearly no TVs capable of extended resolution or optical compression anywhere in the world it would have been even less impressive than the DVD version and while the DVD version was nice most people didn’t notice it even existed. The tech would have to operate entirely inside the player, meaning it would required a squeezed disc not compatible with any player. To be popular it would have to have been part of the spec in the first place so there was no division of the user base. However since the TVs of the 70s didn’t have a 16:9 enhanced mode you’d only see the improvement from having the disc squeezed, your TV would still be wasting its resolution on the black bars.

The other thing to consider, timeline-wise, is that Pioneer was constantly in a struggle between perfecting/improving the LD format and trying to stop the costs from going crazy high. Every year there was some new feature but every year they had to make players cheaper. I’m sure they thought about how much resolution was wasted on letterboxing but couldn’t come up with a better idea. I sure can’t.


EDIT: I just realized that even a version that works totally in the player would require it display resolution higher than NTSC...so yeah, basically it was impossible until they eventually did it with Squeeze.

In short, no.

I'm guessing the reason for the odd "squeezed" discovision title is simply down to the fact that they hadn't quite made up their minds about using pan&scan yet. Old scope films probably already had them for television broadcasts but back then a lot of movies would simply be re-released into theaters rather than put on the TV, and they probably didn't have TV versions of movies like The Black Hole which was still relatively fresh off the big screen.

Yeah. When I was a kid, when Discovision was current, it wasn’t uncommon to see films on TV that were compressed to fit all the titles on screen (ie: everyone is very skinny) then moved to pan and scan once the titles stopped, then squeezed again at the end or perhaps with new titles. Also, TVs were 19”, used RF connections %99.9 of the time and about %40 of the time were b/w. There wasn’t a huge interest in max resolution back then...