As a finished product, I agree that fullscreen is terrible. I was mostly commenting that you get higher resolution image on that part what is still there... assuming that it's pan & scanned from a high resolution source and not the companion widescreen version. In case that isn't clear, if the pan and scan version comes from the film negative or a 2k or 4k scan of the negative, then you get some higher quality images than the widescreen version. Not that you'd want to watch it that way, but if you wanted to *ahem* borrow the images for DVD covers, or fan edits, or something like that... they are higher quality than the widescreen of the same since they are made of more pixels.
Furthermore:
There are 345,600 pixels in a 4x3 480p image. If ~50% of those pixels are black bars and another %25 of those pixels are the sides that are cut off during pan and scanning... then the equivalent pan and scan image is 1/4 of the total resolution: 86,400. Compared to the resolution of the same box in the P&S version: 345,600. There are 921,600 pixels in a 16x9 720p image. The same movie would be about 33% black bar in this movie. And then the same square would be about half of the remaining image. Or 304,128 pixels. So, the resoltion of the P&S square (likely the most important part of the image) is actually higher in the SD P&S image than it is in the HD Widescreen image (at 720p). Of course, the best is the 1080p image.
Again, I'm not advocating watching movies in P&S, but for creative types looking to borrow the images, the value of a P&S release should not be overlooked. Based on the assumption that the P&S pixel data come from a higher def source than the wideside version itself.
