But on the anamorphic side of things, I have to say...
Harsh but true Karyudo!
The point most people miss when discussing anamorphic vs letterbox is this.
If you have a widescreen TV or HDTV then your TV or DVD player has to try and zoom and rescale the letterbox image *in real time* using its internal electronics.
This leaves you at the mercy of whatever quick and dirty resizing algorithm your particular brand of TV/player uses.
The idea of us taking a letterboxed original and scaling it up to anamorphic is that we can do it using much better (and much slower) algorithms than your widescreen TV does. We don't need it to be realtime, so we can use the best processes available to do the scaling, even if they take an ice age to render.
There is no extra 'real' information in the resultant anamorphic transfer of course, but it will look a hell of a lot better on a widescreen TV, as it is no longer doing the zoom/upscale process with its 'on the fly' inbuilt scaler.
Obviously if you have a standard definition 4:3 display (i.e. an old telly) then a straight letterbox transfer is going to be the optimal solution for you.