I mean I have some widescreen VHS but they are rare. And I have a lot of laserdisc widescreen but they never really caught on. Why did it take until DVD for it to be widely (get it?) adopted?
Before widescreen TVs became the norm, people felt ripped off with the ‘black bars’ because it wasn’t making full use of the screen.
I imagine it’s a combination of better public knowledge about widescreen (I remember back “in the day” most people would complain that the hate widescreen because it “cuts the top and bottom of the picture off!”) and bigger TV’s being more affordable.
I’ve always been an advocate for widescreen, but even I will admit that on a TV smaller than 25" it’s annoying and not always worth it.
I didn’t have a wide screen that why. Everything was smaller to fit the width with wide screen and I didn’t want everything harder to see.
Three things had to converge for widescreen to catch on.
1: Widescreen televisions had to become affordable. About 18 years ago, Sony was trying to sell a (IIRC) 32" 16:9 TV for about $5,000. Didn’t do too well. Now, a 32" LCD sells for about $400, and probably has better picture quality than that $5,000 monster.
2: Widescreen programming had to become widely and painlessly available. It took the introduction of the DVD and some tweaks to the original DVD design such as adding the reverse spiral layer to double capacity to allow studios to put wide and traditional formats of a movie on one disc. Before that, stores had to cope with stocking pan-n-scan and widescreen versions.
3: People had to get used to the idea of watcing widescreen at home and convincing everyone else in the house that the TV is not broken.
This is not entirely accurate. The majority of the initial batch of DVDs were issued only widescreen. “Full screen” movies (mostly from Warner Bros.) and two separate editions for each display ratio didn’t come until later.
Great article on Slate.com from several years ago speaking to this topic in general, and evil corporation Blockbuster Video’s culpability for the delay.
I tell you this: The day that Blockbuster finally goes tits up will be a day of great celebration in the Cicero household!
I don’t know. Some of those XBR’s with the super fine pitch tubes still beat most all flatscreens today, barring the high end plasmas in picture quality.
There is also a much higher level of structural difficulty making a cathode ray tube of widescreen proportions instead of closer to a square or round (like the earliest TVs) shape. It took the obsolescence of the 4:3 CRT tube to economically enable widescreen for the mass market.
Yes, the further back “back in the day” is, the smaller the average TV screen is, and the worse a “widescreen” movie looks.
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I don’t know. Some of those XBR’s with the super fine pitch tubes still beat most all flatscreens today.
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I had a 40" Wega XBR TV. Looked *amazing *at the time, but next to a plain old 720p plasma, it looks like crap. Gave it to some friends that had the space to hold a mammoth 300 pound TV about four years ago, and every time I visit, I’d see it and think “I used to think this was a good TV??”
That XBR only displayed 480p. IIRC, it could accept up to a 1080i signal on the component input. (No HDMI back then) But, compared to a regular TV of the era, it was a much better picture.
So the heartburn for retailers and rental shops came a bit later - smaller stores that didn’t have room to stock both versions had to pick one or the other and chances were good that they picked the wrong one. I can remember those days of going to the video store and leaving disappointed because they only had the mutilated “fullscreen” version in stock.
But many of those early widescreen DVDs were not anamorphic. Translation: they were not 16:9 friendly, so if they were watched on a widescreen TV there would be two sets of black bars, top& bottom and left& right. The original Spartacus DVD was an example of this. You could use your zoom function to expand in both directions but you’d lose picture quality - defeating the purpose of the DVD. I still have a few of these (purchased when I didn’t know any better). Most have been re-issued in the correct format.
Why should Blockbuster be blamed for giving the customers they wanted? Consumers are the ones at fault here.
yeah I was thinking more along the lines of a xbr960 which was widescreen and could do 480i and p, 720p, and 1080i. and that super fine pitch tube was/is awesome you can’t even see the phospor dots/pixels . my friend has one properly calibrated and it is stunning.
On my Christmas list, I still have to specify widescreen dvds, otherwise I have to sneak a peek at the back and try to to hide my disappointment that I’m now the owner of a cropped epic. For comefldies, I don’t care as much.
Renting vhs flicks in the eighties, I recall that my parents didn’t understand widescreen, and felt ripped off by the “black bars”. They must not have been alone, because those widescreen vhs makers started putting a message at the beginning that this preserved the original format.