page 2 of 3
Your Next TV: Choosing Aspect Ratio
Why different aspect ratios for movies and TV?
Until the transition to digital television began a few years ago, wide screens were only found in movie theaters. But it wasn't always that way. Movies made in the 1950s and before are nearly all 4:3, including classics like Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, and Singin' in the Rain. The widescreen trend really began during the '50s, when the Hollywood studios were looking for ways to make the
movie theater viewing experience more exciting than that newfangled invention called television. In fact, when the color TV standard was adopted in 1953, the 4:3 aspect ratio was chosen in part because it had been the standard movie aspect ratio until then!
As studio movies played a bigger role in TV programming, and eventually became available for home viewing on VHS tapes, two methods developed for transferring widescreen movies to video for TV viewing: "pan & scan" and "letterbox." In a pan & scan transfer, the video camera "pans and scans" back and forth across the film image to keep the most important action centered on your TV screen. The problem is that this approach cuts out as much
as 50% of the film's original image! You know you're about to view a pan & scan version when this message appears onscreen before the movie starts:
This film has been modified from its original version.
It has been formatted to fit your screen.
The alternative to the pan & scan approach is "letterboxing," which retains the full width of the film's original aspect ratio, but places black bars above and below the image to fill the unused screen space. During the years when VHS dominated movies on video, the majority of titles were pan & scan. But DVD movies are more often widescreen, which has generated both cheers and jeers from home theater fans.
Many serious film buffs feel that movies can only be fully appreciated when viewed in their original aspect ratio. For modern movies, that means widescreen, because viewers see the whole image, the way the director intended. For these movie purists, whittling a widescreen image down to pan & scan width is as bad as colorizing a black-and-white film. But for folks who do most of their movie-watching on a 4:3 TV at home, the black bars
above and below the movie image represent not artistic integrity, but wasted screen space!
This is where individual taste enters the picture. Sure, film can be an art form, but first and foremost, it's entertainment. To insist that everyone watch only widescreen versions of movies is like forcing someone who is hungry for a hamburger to eat a steak. You could argue that a steak is a superior cut, but that's really beside the point — when you want a burger, you want a burger!
|
4:3 Screen |
16:9 Screen |
4:3 image |
4:3 image with vertical bars on sides |
16:9 (1.78:1) image |
16:9 (1.78:1) image |
1.85:1 image |
1.85:1 image |
2.35:1 image |
2.35:1 image |
|
|
4:3 image stretched to fill 16:9 screen |
Banishing those black bars
As mentioned earlier, neither 4:3 nor 16:9 TVs can automatically display a screen-filling image for all video sources. But, if you really dislike the idea of blank bars sharing screen space with the movie image, there are some steps you can take to eliminate or at least minimize those bars.
-
For 4:3 screens: Because DVD does widescreen movies so much better than VHS did, widescreen DVDs tend to be the norm. But many DVD titles — especially mega-selling blockbusters — are available in either widescreen or "full frame" 4:3 versions. And some DVDs feature both versions on the same disc. Be sure to read the DVD box carefully to determine which format(s) you're getting. On the hardware side, many DVD
players include a "zoom" feature that lets you enlarge the image to fill more of the screen (of course, by filling the screen's vertical space, you're also chopping off the sides of the image). Some players even have a zoom mode tailored for 4:3 screens, with names like "Screen Fit" or "4:3 Zoom."
-
For 16:9 screens: If you'd like to get rid of the vertical bars or "pillars" that appear when viewing standard 4:3-format network TV programming, it's going to require some stretching. (Not you, you can stay in your chair.) Virtually every widescreen TV includes one or more viewing modes that fill out the screen's width by stretching, zooming, or stretching and zooming the image. While most people find this effect
acceptable for non-critical "background" viewing like the local news, many aren't thrilled when their favorite actors suddenly look noticeably stockier. Again, it's up to each viewer's personal taste.
