Originally posted by: ripa The only reason to convert to anamorphic would be if the scanlines become too visible on a widescreen CRT television when using letterbox mode.
Bingo. I have a 55" rear projection CRT TV. My set has to do it's "zoom" function optically. While not terrible, it certainly does not look good, and artifacts are obvious to me. By converting to anamorphic (DVD-9), I save myself the steps of expanding the picture, and the improvements are worth it based on my successes so far.
If I could only get rid of the interlacing artifacts, I'd be one happy camper. These errors must be hard encoded into the frames. I use a Denon DVD-3910 DVD player, which I've never been able to trip up before due to the internal Faroudja processing.