Video Asylum

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr (A) on July 15, 2006 at 18:05:20

In Reply to: widescreen 1.85:1 versus 16:9 posted by Ole Lund Christensen on July 15, 2006 at 12:22:05:

The best setup is a constant height projector/screen combo. When you watch a 2.35:1 movie vs a 1.85:1 movie on such a setup, the height of both movies is the same but the width of the 2.35:1 movie is wider (a la the theater/cinema). The reason we have 16x9 (aka 1.78:1) is because the movie people are snobs and the TV people were short-sighted: both are stupid.

A long time ago in an era far, far away...
...theater screens were or were very close to 4x3 (aka 1.33:1). When TV emerged, the screens naturally followed this form of its bigger cousin. The movie industry wanted to differentiate itself from its little cousin. Theaters and the movies which were shown in them moved (around the early '50s) to wider presentations. Obviously TV didn't follow this trend and the two stayed in their own little worlds for a long time.

Fast forward to recent history. The TV people have decided that they need to go wider as well. They form a gathering to exchange ideas and invite the movie industry to participate. The snobs decided that they didn't want to be a part of the television industry's party: none of them showed. The short-sighted TV people picked a "compromise" between the "then" current 4x3 (1.33:1) format and the wider 1.85:1 format, thus the asinine 16x9 (1.78:1) format was launched.

What did the snobs and short-sighted industries accomplish by not cooperating with each other? They created a 4th format where only 3 had existed. Movies are either 1.85:1 or 2.xx:1 (2.20, 2.35, 2.40 -- I group all of these goofy shits together) and television is 4x3 (1.33:1). Why create another format (16:9/1.78:1) when you could have picked one of the existing ones as the new television standard? There's no way in hell you could stretch 4x3 (1.33:1) to 2.xx:1 and still keep viewers. Stretching 4x3 (1.33:1) to 1.85:1, which is only slightly wider than 16x9/1.78:1, wouldn't have been that big of a deal. Using 1.85:1 makes at least one match with existing formats and keeps the number of formats to 3, thus the wisest choice would have been to select 1.85:1 as the new television format.

Duh!!!

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