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Why do we have wide-screen displays?

Rick, Cinemascope films have exactly the same number of frames per foot as does "regular" 4:3 stock. The stretching to wide-screen is done with optics. One could do likewise horizontal and/or vertical stretching by substituting the appropriate optics. As I recall, it was just an anamorphic front element attached to a standard Kollmorgen projection lens. Made for a very heavy hunk of glass.

In fact, on a frame-by-frame basis, Cinemascope films have worse definition that do 4:3 stuff.
 
Oddly enough my FoV is sufficient that a widescreen DOES fit my field of view, the normal FoV for a human is 120 degrees by 60 degrees without swinging your head around. If you are seated close enough to a 16:9 display that your side to side vision is exceeded without exceeding top to bottom, you've got a pretty nasty case of tunnel vision and may want to talk to an optometrist.

But to be fair my field of vision exceeds the size of my glasses, and I'm wearing aviators. I can't even think about wearing anything 'smaller' as it interferes too much with my sight... but I've been tested as noticing 160x90 so... Hey, 160x90... isn't that...
 
Chuck(G) said:
Rick, Cinemascope films have exactly the same number of frames per foot as does "regular" 4:3 stock.
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Yes, but who the blazes makes Cinemascope movies after the 1960's... even when they were called Cinemascope after 1960 they were actually Panavision, which DID use less aspect per frame... though that was also the transition from 55mm to 70mm so it ended up a wash... and yeah, in distribution, particularly as 35mm it was still stretched on delivery.

NOT that most places until the '90's outside of art houses distributed on anything other than 35mm.

I'm just thankful we don't have actual cinemascope aspect ratios... 12:5 is just a bit ridiculous... though that's probably what I have here with the three displays.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Maybe that explains it--I've worn glasses all my life, so the width of my field of view is somewhat restricted.
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Field of view, or field of critical comprehension? I've worn glasses since I was a kid, and I too know about the rims bothering the field. Right now I'm wearing a huge lens and it's relaxing in one way, but it doesn't make me see more. I have a very wide field of view - I'd say likely wider that 160 (I'm not going to get up and try to actually measure it now), but when I stare straight ahead and bring my fingers from behind my head along the stems of my glasses, I see them long before they reach the hinge.

The technique I use to analyse my visual field is different from some other people I guess. When I'm writing this line, for example, I don't read the one above. In fact I sometimes (not always) don't even read more than one letter at a time. I just prefer to concentrate on very small parts at a time - and no, I certainly do not have tunnel vision. In looking at a computer screen, I either have to know where something is, from past experience, or I take a long time to find it by scanning. I prefer looking at a still picture for hours, while I take in all the details one by one. Paintings are my favourite, because I get to know them over the years. Yes I can see the whole visual field around me, but it doesn't compute in the same way as the detail does. One reason I'm taking the time to write all this, is that I think generalizing about how other people see is just plain wrong.
 
Rick, go to the ED article sighted above and look for the shot of what's seen in the viewfinder. "Cinema Delivery" aspect is shown at 2.39:1 (2048 x 858).

We're still filming at Cinemascope-type aspect ratios, as far as I can tell.
 
4:3 monitors have too much surface area per screen size compared to widescreens and bigger size is what sells monitors (and TV's for that matter). LCD defects used to be a major issue and ramping up screen size (square inches) made it worse so widescreens allowed to bigger screens but less area compared to the normal 4:3 monitors.

I prefer a more square screen (using a 19" 1280x1024 LCD screen that tilts 90 Degees if needed). The full HD monitors aren't bad (1900x1200) but those little laptops with the 1366x720 screen SUCK for browsing. Makes me glad I have my old T40 (14" 1400x1050) and T43P (15" 1600x1200) Thinkpads.
 
I'm reading this on a 19" NEC "old style" LCD monitor, with adjustable elevation and tilt. For me, the amount of horizontal and veridical information displayed is about perfect. One of the Newegg stores was selling refurb ones for $69 each, shipped. I picked up two.
 
Great Hierophant said:
I wonder if Blu-ray has an anamorphic feature like DVDs.
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For SD content, yes, same as DVD. (Meaning, you can create an MPEG-2 720x480 file with the 16:9 anamorphic flag set, and it will display as if it were 853x480 square pixels.) For HD content, no.

BTW that TV is a joke. It detects 2.35:1 content, clips the letterboxing off, and scales the image to fit the full area of the TV. This produces a worse picture than if you just displayed it on a 16:9 TV and left things alone, because on the 16:9 TV, you maintain a 1:1 pixel display of the original contents.

I really hate it when companies take advantage of "audiophiles/cinephiles/videophiles" because such people are easily parted with their money and it makes me sick. I saw a TV show recently where a self-described audiophile had spent $500K on a pair of speakers because they were "the best". If that guy ever concedes to a double-blind test he's going to put a gun in his mouth after getting the results...
 
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Chuck said:
Rick, Cinemascope films have exactly the same number of frames per foot as does "regular" 4:3 stock.
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Yeah, that's why I said "at a given resolution" - the anamorphic lens technique trades resolution for aspect.

I couldn't count how many times I've seen wrong aspect ratios being displayed in store demos of wide-screen digital monitors that just fill the available screen regardless of source aspect ratio. The kind of edge-distortions you get with a 22m wide-angle lens if they try to emulate anamorphia, or skinny actresses puffed out to size 24 when they use pixel aspect ratio. Can be quite comical.

There are very few remote controls that make it intuitive enough to adjust aspect ratio. I wonder what proportion of viewers use any remote buttons other than channel, volume, and perhaps source. And how many even know what "anamorphic" or "letterbox" mean?

Rick
 
RickNel said:
Chuck said:

Yeah, that's why I said "at a given resolution" - the anamorphic lens technique trades resolution for aspect.

I couldn't count how many times I've seen wrong aspect ratios being displayed in store demos of wide-screen digital monitors that just fill the available screen regardless of source aspect ratio. The kind of edge-distortions you get with a 22m wide-angle lens if they try to emulate anamorphia, or skinny actresses puffed out to size 24 when they use pixel aspect ratio. Can be quite comical.

There are very few remote controls that make it intuitive enough to adjust aspect ratio. I wonder what proportion of viewers use any remote buttons other than channel, volume, and perhaps source. And how many even know what "anamorphic" or "letterbox" mean?

Rick
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You can do it with a fairly reasonably priced Logitech Harmony 650.
 
Based on current trends, in a decade or so we'll hit 16:1 displays. Remember: if it ain't like looking through the slit of a medieval knight's helmet, it ain't true widescreen!

And if they need a catchy name for this new standard, Wikipedia's already rife with WSVGA, WQSXGA, WHUXGA, etc.; just call it WOOGABOOGA - Wide Oversized Omphalos-Gazing Absolutely-Bangin' Octa-Ocular Gigapixel Array.

FOV of the future:

Burgonet-helmet.jpg
 
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Movies moved to a wider format as a gimmick to compete with television, then television moved to a wider format to compete with movies. It's capitalism; it doesn't have to make sense.
 
Cinemascope back in 1953 was more or less a gimmick to get people out of the homes watching TV and back into the Cinema, the earliest of Cinemascope movies were notoriously huge, which go past the sight of vision for an eye to physically watch an whole area of moving pictures at that moment, perhaps the majority of the picture, though being closer to the picture (front seat) rather than being up in the back row would play a role too. Hitchcock I don't think went anywhere past 1.85:1 as a rule in his later movies, though when Cinemascope was relatively new he was given the option to use that or go 3D, so he went 3D and "Dial M For Murder" was the result.

Though I've heard some interesting stories about the earlier 1.37:1 movies Vs. TV. Obviously for the case of old TV it was 1.33:1, so some of the old movies you miss a little bit of the picture, though TVs come in different Size screens, so even when some of those early movies came out, Cinema had one fixed sized screen and I've just heard stories about stuff going back to the Charlie Chaplin days about how his movies were a lot funnier on the big screen because there was more detail and could pick up the gag easier. I think this explains in more recent decades why TV shows like "Police Squad" failed and movies like "The Naked Gun" had more success, and it's a problem we might face today when it comes to Cinema Vs. TV, Cinema gives you a true size to view a movie & TV forces you to make a judgement on what size is suitable in a home environment.
 
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