Whats the difference between widescreen and anamorphic?
These terms are often confused, but they’re not interchangeable. On a standard widescreen DVD, the disc is encoded with both the widescreen movie and the black bars (at the top and bottom of the picture) that are necessary to properly fit the movie onto a standard 4:3 ratio TV screen. (In other words, precious data storage is required to generate the black bars.) On an anamorphic DVD, the widescreen movie is compressed to fit a standard 4:3 TV screen, then decompressed by your player, which generates the black bars at top and bottom to accommodate the widescreen image. Anamorphic widescreen is best appreciated by those who own widescreen (16:9) video monitors, because this allows the entire anamorphic image to fill the screen at full resolution, with no black bars. (Consequently, the issue of widescreen vs.
Related Questions
- Some DVDs are labeled "Fullscreen", some say "Letterboxed" and others say "Anamorphic", "Widescreen" or "Enhanced". What is the difference?
- I see some of my movies say 4:3 and/or 16:9 Widescreen, what is the difference, and is one better then the other?
- What is the difference between anamorphic widescreen and regular widescreen dvds?
