Unknown date Danny Briere, Pat Hurley

https://www.dummies.com/consumer-electronics/home-
theater/aspect-ratios-widescreen-letterbox-pan-and-scan/

Aspect Ratios: Widescreen, Letterbox,

Pan and Scan
By Danny Briere, Pat Hurley

The concept of aspect ratio can be di cult to grasp, but easy to

understand once you see it. Aspect ratio is the ratio of the width of a
display compared to its height. For example, the aspect ratio for
widescreen displays is 16:9 and the ratio for traditional TVs is 4:3.

For home theater purposes, you should go with a widescreen (16:9)

display — that’s the right aspect ratio for DVDs, high-de nition TV
programming, and even many video games. If you’re buying a cheap
tube TV for the kitchen or guest bedroom, you might still choose to
go with 4:3.

Widescreen lm was one of the innovations that survived and has

since dominated the cinema. Today, you tend to nd lms in one of
two widescreen aspect ratios:

Academy Standard (or Flat), which has an aspect ratio of 1.85:1.

Anamorphic Scope (or Scope), which has an aspect ratio of

2.35:1. Scope is also called Panavision or CinemaScope.

If your television isn’t widescreen and you want to watch a

widescreen lm, you have a problem. And the industry powers that
be have come up with two solutions:

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2021. 01. 18. Aspect Ratios: Widescreen, Letterbox, Pan and Scan

Pan and Scan: For each frame of a lm, a decision is made as to

what constitutes the action area. That part of the lm frame is
retained, and the rest is lost. What’s left is usually a fraction of
the main frame, sometimes as little as 65 percent of it, and this
can often leave out the best parts of a picture.

Letterboxing: The second approach is to display the original full

image on the TV set without lling the whole screen. When
watching content formatted for a widescreen TV (16:9), you see
black bars at the top and bottom of the image. Conversely, when
watching content formatted for TV (4:3) on a widescreen TV,
you see black bars on the left and right of the images. This is
known as windowboxing.

An obvious problem with viewing widescreen images on a normal

4:3 TV is that the image doesn’t use all 480 scanning lines of the
screen. Some of those 480 lines get used just to draw black bars
instead of drawing video you actually watch. (Some 4:3 TVs use a
technique called anamorphic squeeze to eliminate this issue.) This
yields lower resolution, something that anamorphic formats
attempt to resolve.

Also known as 16:9 Enhanced, Widescreen Enhanced, or Enhanced

for 16:9 Televisions, anamorphic presentation squeezes the image
horizontally until the full 4:3 frame is lled. If you look at an
anamorphic picture on a 4:3 screen, the picture appears somewhat
distorted because everything is compressed, but the full 480 lines of
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2021. 01. 18. Aspect Ratios: Widescreen, Letterbox, Pan and Scan

content are retained. Luckily, when you tell your DVD player you
have a 4:3 screen, it puts the anamorphic image back into a
letterbox. When played through a 16:9 player, the original width is
presented, while maintaining the full 480 vertical lines of
resolution.

Most DVDs have both a Pan and Scan and a widescreen format
(either letterboxed or anamorphic) on a DVD. Because including
both versions creates an added expense to the studios, some DVDs
ship with just one format onboard, and some titles actually have
di erent formats on di erent discs. Be sure to check before you buy
a disc if this is important to you.

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