If youve visited any electronics store recently, youve probably been amazed at the wide screen televisions they have on display. These TVs are the optimal displays for viewing DVDs, as the majority of DVDs on the market today are actually enhanced for wide screen televisions. This enhancement (oftentimes referred to as anamorphic) increases the resolution of the DVD, improving the picture quality.
When viewing DVDs on a standard television set, youll usually notice black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. A good way to think about this is to compare your television set to a picture frame. When you take a panoramic picture with your camera, the resulting photograph is long and narrow, shaped rectangular like a movie screen. In order to fit this panoramic photo into a regular square picture frame, youll need to cut off the sides of the extra-wide picture.
No More Cropping on Wide Screen Televisions
When you watch a VHS movie, youre usually watching a cropped version, which is missing valuable visual information. However, with DVDs, the image is shrunk and black bars are added to the top and bottom to preserve the original width of the image. While the picture may be smaller on your screen, youre actually seeing more information than you would with a cropped VHS version. Depending on the height and width of the image (otherwise known as aspect ratio), the black bars will fluctuate in size.
What wide screen televisions do is allow the viewer to watch their DVDs on a rectangular screen, eliminating the need for large black bars distracting you while watching a movie. Its important to mention that wide screen televisions wont always eliminate the black bars from TVs, as the aspect ratio can vary from movie to movie. More often than not, you will find that DVDs fit perfectly within wide screen televisions, but when one is a little wider than the TV set, small black bars are added to the top and bottom, preserving the original aspect ratio, and giving you the higher resolution that anamorphic DVDs feature.
