Originally posted by: darkhelmet
Scruffy and THX: Wouldn't 4:3 TVs benefit from the anamorphic video ever so slightly due to the fact that the letterboxing is handled via the DVD player and not just a lower resolution letterboxed version being spit out natively?

Actually an anamorphic DVD shown on a 4x3 TV, one that's not capable of vertical compression (some Sony sets are capable of this), would at best be equivalent to a high quality non-anamorphic DVD shown on the same TV. In order for a DVD player to show a correctly proportioned picture from an anamorphic mastered DVD on a 4x3 display, it must remove information to reduce the vertical dimension of the picture. If the DVD player does a perfect job of removing the excess information, the amount of picture information remaining would be equal to that of a non-anamorphic DVD.

TV sets with vertical compression change the proportion of height to width by changing the scanning of the electron gun within the picture tube. In this way no picture information is lost, but the vertical dimension of the picture is shortened. So the picture quality would be equivalent to a similar wide screen TV, although the picture may be smaller.

I offer this information hesitantly, because I'm a big proponent of anamorphic DVD's, and widescreen formats as the future of TV is widescreen. Widescreen more closely fits theater formats.