This drives me fucking nuts. I don’t think that HD tv will every really take off. If people are satisfied with gross distortions to the picture why the hell do we need anymore resolution.
While I agree with you on principle, I’m going to side with VCO3 on this one, because they advertise all sorts of stuff with stickers on the Godforshitting transparent diamond-kevlar wrapper, and they often cover up the useful stuff that’s printed on the box for the customer’s benefit. You can’t peel off that wrapper without a 54MW argon laser and/or a claymore sword, and if you do they’ll bring in rent-a-cops to Rodney your ass and then press charges. All I want is a movie that fills up my screen and looks like the movies do when I go to the movies. I don’t want Zapruder panning and scanning to make sure JFK’s head stays in frame – I want to clearly see the guy on the grassy knoll, stage left! I also want to have a pint of whatever VCO3 drank with breakfast.
I find it hard to care very much about aspect ratio.
I have the widescreen Forbidden Planet, got it just recently. It’s awesome!
I totally agree with the OP. I’m at the point at which I want to toss all my old video tapes of widescreen films; I want to see the real version or nothing.
Great! Where’d you get it?
Christ on a pogo stick, dude. HDTV is broadcast in 16:9. There is no distortion when it’s transmitted to a 16:9 TV. Everything you see on a widescreen TV is not HDTV. HDTV is a separate signal that requires a separate tuner/receiver (although some widescreen TVs have built in HDTV tuner/receivers). If you’re watching with a regular tuner/receiver on a widescreen TV and you see “broadcast in HDTV” you’re still not seeing HDTV. You’ve got to have the receiver/tuner (which most cable companies will supply for like $10 extra/month). HDTV, the airplane, the car, penicillin, the wheel, fire . . . they’ll never catch on.
As to the question posed by kaylasdad99 which I kind of answered in response to Zsofia (Zsofia, sorry for the snark, I thought you were replying to a question I asked), here’s how it works on a widescreen TV: A regular DVD player on its default setting playing a “widescreen” DVD will transmit a 4:3 picture, complete with black bars, that then has to be stretched lest you have four bars: two black below and two gray to the sides. Most widescreens have several options to stretch, or if you must, crop, so that the screen is full. My DVD player, I have just discovered has a setting for widescreen TVs that will send a 16:9 picture to the TV when a “widescreen” DVD is playing. Since most movies are shot at 18:10, this lead to my question, “is it cropping or stretching to accommodate the admittedly smaller difference in the ratios?”
Here’s the thing - the DVD cover has a gigantic “COLLECTOR’S EDITION” bar at the top of it and a tiny “Fullscreen Edition,” in grey print on a black surface, at the bottom. I looked at the cover and didn’t even see it - and I’m a person who always checks!
Here’s the cover. Can you put “Fullscreen” on there?
It was really the “collector’s edition” tag that got me - wouldn’t you expect something labeled “collector’s edition” to be THE definitive edition of something, not some artificially altered, cropped version? A “COLLECTOR’S EDITION” of a DVD SHOULD NEVER BE THE CROPPED VERSION! It’s like if you went to a book store and picked up "The definitive COLLECTOR’S EDITION of James Joyce’s Ulysses, only to get home, open it up, and find out that it was an illustrated, large print version with added “Family Circus” cartoons! INSANITY!
Dress up nice (so you look respectable), take it back to Target, go to the Customer Service desk, explain what happened and that you can’t find the receipt. I’d be very surprised if they didn’t let you exchange it for the wide-screen version.
Am I mistaken, or do some scenes in Fullscreen actually show more stuff than the Widescreen? It’s technically possible since the camera usually takes more “acreage” of a shot than is actually used in the film, to account for the chance boom, offcentering the shot, etc. While certainly the majority of changes in pan n scan vs original will be just that, panning and scanning, are there not some shots that add stuff rather than delete it to preserve the aspect ratio? (To say nothing of the instances where it actually looks better to crop unnecessary stuff out, which happens occasionally as well.)
Which is not to say that it doesn’t take a lot of work to make it nearly as good as the original. Maybe I’m biased because the only movie I’ve seen in Wide and Fullscreen both is LORT:FOTR and I thought they did a very good job on that except in the few instances where it would have been more natural to have both actors in a conversation on the screen at once (and trust me, I did notice a lot of differences.) Then again maybe I was satisfied because it didn’t suck as much as the widescreen zealots lead me to believe 
That said, I also wish widescreen would be the default and that the format should be better labelled.
Well, I suppose I ought to jump in as another who, for my own personal use, perfers full screen. Hold on! Put down your pitchforks and let me explain.
I am currently using my super bitchin, very high tech, top of the line, multimillion dollar 13 inch tv. Oh yes. Because I clearly wiped out my bank account on such a high end purchase, the prospect of getting a new TV is far off. (Ok, the thing was actually given to me). It’s hard enough watching anything on a 13 inch TV, let alone a movie where half of my tiny screen is taken up by giant black bars. Once I get a real TV, I’ll be all for wide screen.
In fact, my dad just bought a 52 inch HD Plasma TV. Now THAT is a movie watchin’ TV. One where wide screen is absolutely necessary and damn entertaining at that.
Now, if someone would like to buy me a 52 inch plasma-- hell, I’ll even just take a nice, new, 27 inch wide screen TV-- I’ll be more than happy to change my ways. Email is in profile.
Oh let me add: I don’t understand why all DVDs don’t do like Disney. Disney movies (I’m a huge fan) give you two options on every disc: full and wide screen. This is wonderful because if I’m watching it on my shit-tastic TV, I can watch it in full and if I’m at my dad’s house, I can watch it in wide.
I suppose movie makers don’t because that would mean less money for them, but damnit! It’s a good idea.
Probably because both versions don’t always FIT on a single DVD, especially if the producers of the DVD version want to include any extras but don’t want to do a 2-disc set.
Of course, this would be more feasible if every DVD sold was a multi-disc set.
Granted, but there’s really no reason why the DVD spec couldn’t include crop markers to enable different views on the same video stream; after all, the only “extra” information on a Full Screen showing is two vertical lines showing which bits to chop off. That way you could get the Widescreen and Full Screen angles off a single video stream.
I have no idea if this feature is included in the DVD spec, but it really ought to be; it’s beyond trivial.
Some directors shoot in 4:3, and then crop the movie later. Stanley Kubrick is one of them, as I recall. In those cases, you actually do get more information in the fullscreen version, but you still may not be watching the movie as the director intended it to be watched.
Composition is important. If a director frames a scene to be watched in a certain aspect ratio, and later someone with a lot less artistic talent jiggers it with Pan n’ Scan and cropping to compose it differently, you are watching something of signficantly inferior quality. And it’s not just about having characters cropped out or losing context - it’s also just a loss of artistic vision. Take a great painting, and re-compose it by cropping the top or sides off, and you’ll wind up with a lesser piece of art. A great director will use every inch of the scene to good effect. Every shot is composed carefully to evoke mood, or to draw the eye to significant details, or simply to be visually balanced.
I hate fulllscreen. The local Blockbuster is really bad for putting fullscreen movies on the shelf and not even labelling them as such. Sometimes they’ll even mislabel them. It’s burned me so many times that I rarely even rent from them any more.
Okay, here’s another question: I have a widescreen tv, and an HD DVD Player. I have the DVD player set so that it knows my tv is 16:9, but when I play a widescreen DVD, I still get the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. What gives? I must admit though, that it never occurred to me to try to stretch or zoom the picture when watching widescreen dvds. It seems to me that “zooming” would cut off part of the picture. Am I correct in this?
Dude What the hell is your problem. I am talking about showing normal TV on a wide screen TV and stretching it to fill up the whole screen.
It strikes me that there’s really no excuse to have black bars in the screen. Surely we have the technology to occupy that space with a thematically-congruous wallpaper.
DiosaBellisima, have you considered your local Goodwill store? $25 can obtain you some surprising results, and to paraphrase Oscar Madison, you can give up wearing clean socks for a week. 
Yeah, I don’t know if they do that or not, but it would seem that it shouldn’t be too hard to do so. Although I’ve seen discs set up as 2-sided DVDs, so that one side shows the widescreen and one side shows the pan-and-scan. So clearly it wasn’t done this way on those. (My copy of “Fargo” is like that).
And it would have to be a stream of crop markers (i.e. movable, rather than stationary). But that would still take less space than a totally separate video stream (and audio stream, in the case of those 2-sided DVDs. What a waste of space…)
There’s more than one widescreen movie ratio. If the DVD is in 1.85:1, you shouldn’t see letterboxing on your 16:9 TV. (Or if you do, it will be very thin bars.)
If the movie was shot in anamorphic widescreen, or 2.35:1, you’ll see letterboxing because that format is wider than 16:9.