Originally posted by: zombie84
Exactly what I said before. The only 100% anamorphic image is a film with an aspect ratio of 16x9 (which I believe is 1.78). As it drifts away from this, letterboxing becomes necessary, whether it is getting narrower (ie 1.66 will have slight side letterboxing, 1.54 will have even more) or if its getting wider (ie 1.85 will have slight top/bottom letterboxing, 2:35 will have more). Its just logically impossible to do it any other way since a widescreen television has a fixed aspect ratio and films come in all sorts of tiny variances. 16x9 was chosen because it was considered the best medium since it is between the American and European academy standards (1.66 vs 1.85), thus is was the best overall choice to minimise letterboxing effect. Personally they should have just gone with the american standard since wider is being more and more accepted.
Exactly what I said before. The only 100% anamorphic image is a film with an aspect ratio of 16x9 (which I believe is 1.78). As it drifts away from this, letterboxing becomes necessary, whether it is getting narrower (ie 1.66 will have slight side letterboxing, 1.54 will have even more) or if its getting wider (ie 1.85 will have slight top/bottom letterboxing, 2:35 will have more). Its just logically impossible to do it any other way since a widescreen television has a fixed aspect ratio and films come in all sorts of tiny variances. 16x9 was chosen because it was considered the best medium since it is between the American and European academy standards (1.66 vs 1.85), thus is was the best overall choice to minimise letterboxing effect. Personally they should have just gone with the american standard since wider is being more and more accepted.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but anamorphic means that one axis of an image (horizontal or vertical) is magnified to a greater degree than its counterpart. This is used in anamorphic DVDs, for instance, to devote more resolution to the actual movie images and not waste space on black bars. Then the DVD software adjusts the image to be the right side and adds black bars on the screen (as apposed to having the black bars present in the actual, visual data.) Laserdisc was not capable of this and that's why non-remastered DVDs have black bars encoded into the actual movie images.
It would make sense that Blu-ray and HD-DVD have a similar feature that would allow non 16x9 data to be stored in an anamorphic format. A 16x9 image on a 16x9 screen would be best if it were not anamorphic (since that would stretch the image).