Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Hornlover (M) on March 12, 2008 at 11:17:44

In Reply to: RE: "but which are mastered for display on 4:3 TV screens." The proper designation would be... posted by clarkjohnsen on March 12, 2008 at 09:39:32

When the disk says 'enhanced for widescreen', it is anamorphic. I came upon a website that explained it all at one time, but I don’t remember the url now. In the setup menu for a DVD player, you have several choices for playback. If you select 'Letterboxed' for output, your DVD player actually takes this anamorphic encoded disk, and using some mathematical algorithms, makes 3 scan lines for every 5. This makes the letterboxed image properly displayed on 4:3 TV sets. If the disk is not enhanced (not anamporphic), the player does nothing, and passes all scan lines as they are. If you select ‘16x9’ in the DVD player setup menu, then it does not do this, and passes on all the scan lines, which will make the image distorted on a 4:3 TV, where the image is stretched vertically, making things look skinny. When using a widescreen (16:9) display, the image is stretched in the horizontal direction, restoring proper aspect ratio. Before I bought my 50” Panasonic plasma, I had a Sony Wega, which supported anamorphic mode by using magnetic compression. You had to set your DVD player to widescreen (16:9) mode, and then when you engaged the compression, the image was ‘squeezed’ to proper aspect ratio. This way, you used more scan lines for the letterboxed image, giving a sharper, more detailed image than when using the DVD players letterboxed mode.