What is interesting is that most the folks here seem to “get” the concept of aspect ratio. That seems to be something that most folks in my experience just don’t understand.
Try telling the company CEO that the reason his Power Point can’t be read from the back of the room is because he used screen fulls of 6 pt type, and NO I can’t make it bigger by just “zooming in” on it.
One other note, back when plasma big screens ruled, there was a valid reason for avoiding any sort of side bars or letterboxing… “burn in” aka permanent image retention. The black bars “wear out” a plasma screen differently from a normal moving image and can eventually become permanently noticeable. One very stupid workaround is to make sure the screen is full of some sort of image all the time. I think that got stuck in people’s minds, to a certain extent, hence the proliferation of pumpkin head people in sports bars.
I guess they didn’t get the memo that “burn-in” doesn’t apply to LCD/LEDs