ESHBG, you want your DVD player set to 16:9. The names of Zoom settings vary from set to set, but it's pretty esy to flip through them to find the best one - there will be one that upscales the letterboxed image to fill the right amount of your screen. Yes, it will be relatively straightforward to make fanamorphic(TM) DVDs from the September discs - they will have the advantages of better scaling that cannot presently be done in real-time, but the disadvantage of re-encoding an already compressed image. Which will ultimately look better will depend on:
how good your real-time scaler is;
who makes the fanamorphic disc (and how);
how good the original compression is.

Originally posted by: THX The fullscreen DVDs do actually have improved resolution in the selected 4:3 area. The same picture area in the anamorphic widescreen DVD uses less pixels horizontally. Originally posted by: MielrI assume you're referring to the difference between the aspect ratio of the standard 16:9 widescreen format and the sometimes "thinner" native aspect ratio of the film itself (and the scan lines that are wasted in the resulting thin black bars that fill in the difference), and a Pan and Scan transfer which extends all the way to the top and bottom of the screen, with no scan lines wasted on black bars?

No, actually I was referring to the fact that anamorphic DVDs have the same overall resolution as fullscreen DVDs (720x480), with the result that the selected portion for the fullscreen edition will actually use more of those horizontal pixels for the same picture area than the anamorphic image will. This is what has led some to suggest combining fullscreen and letterboxed LD rips for increased resolution in part of the image (a bad idea in my opinion but technically possible).

See here - hope this is helpful.