An anamorphic DVD, also known as “Enhanced for Widescreen” or “Enhanced for 16:9”, allows you to display more of the image on a widescreen TV.
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Could we have a more intimidating technical term? You may encounter this jumble of letters in articles on video projector technology and on the back of DVD cases.
Today you’ll often see “anamorphic” used when describing the technology that enables superwide CinemaScope pictures to be viewed on a wide screen. So any discussion of this must start with aspect ratios, or the general shape in width to height, of a video display. Traditional squarish TV is 4:3, or four units in width to every three units in height. Widescreen HDTV is 16:9, also known as 1.78:1. Most movies are shot in the slightly wider format of 1.85:1. CinemaScope, which many blockbuster movies are shot in, is an even wider 2.35:1. Get it?
The difference in format shapes explains why you often see black bars, called letterboxing, on the top and bottom of your screen when watching a movie in a format that’s wider than your display.
An anamorphic DVD—often labeled as “Enhanced for widescreen” or “Enhanced for 16:9” allows for the image to be stretched to fill more of the screen. The term “anamorphic” doesn’t refer to the stretching, however. It actually refers to the squeezing of a picture shot in a widescreen format and then squished into the more squarish TV format on the DVD. (Originally, the term referred to squeezing a widescreen picture to fit onto 35mm film.) Anyway, a widescreen TV can then take that image and stretch it to fill most of the space, usually with narrower black bars. The result not only is a bigger image to view, but one with a higher resolution, for reasons we don’t have the space to go into here.
An anamorphic lens attached to a projector works in a similar way. First, the squished image is scaled to fill the height of the screen so that everyone would be appear unnaturally tall and skinny. But before you ever see the world of tall and skinny people, the anamorphic lens stretches the picture horizontally to fill the width of the screen, and everyone looks normal. The result is a big, wide picture with no more nasty black bars. This also requires a special screen that’s wide enough for the image.
Anamorphic lenses could still be conceivably used to improve picture quality, but they’d be pointless on any true 1080p projector. Say you had a 1280x720 projector, though, and a 1080p source, and a processor that let you cut off the black bars in that 1080p 2.35:1 source. Well, if you resized the active image area of the 1920x1080, (for a 2.35:1 movie, this would take a 1920x817 image), scale it to 1280x720, then stretch it wide optically. No light or pixels wasted in the black bars.
On the other hand, an anamorphic lens + a scaler would cost SIGNIFICANTLY more than a brand new 1080p projector like the optoma HD80 or panasonic AE1000U. So, that excercise would be kind of silly, make it more complicated than necessary, and still give inferior results.
Are anamorphic lens helpful at all with the High Def dvd’s (hddvd &bluray;)? None are anamorphic.
I’m always dissapointed when I receive a DVD from netflix and its non-anamorphic (flat). Sometimes these DVD’s have a horizontal res of 720 but other times its only 640. In that case a movie filmed with an AR of 2.39:1 has only about 270 lines… pitiful (Devil’s Brigade for instance). It looks like crap even of my relatively small 32” HDTV.
And just FYI no movies have been filmed in CinemaScope since the mide 1960’s. That was a process/lenses owned by Fox. When Panavision started making anamorphic lenses that were actually better the studios went to them. In 1970 the aspect ratio was changed from 2.35:1 to 2.39:1 (barely noticeable). Technically movies made this way should be called “modern anamorphic”, but the term scoped is still used.
For an interesting read on all the different widescreen process out there (mostly from the 50’s & 60’): http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/
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Hey Cowclops, you need to go over to AVSForum.com and read about constant height projection. An anamorphic lens DOES improve resolution, particularly ‘scope’ material, and many current video projectors have built-in scalers so the need for an external scaler is unnecessary.