Ok Widescreen Lovers...Help me understand this?

Question

Now that I understand why so many like widescreen, I have one more question. Why, when you purchase a widescreen TV, do you still see the black bars? Why doesn't it FILL the screen since it's widescreen and made for watching widescreen?

Answer 1

A widescreen HDTV viewing a ABC, CBS, .. network HD channel will exactly fill the screen. This is because 16:9 ratio is part of the spec for HD.

But movies - have at least 7 different ratios. They are often close to "16:9", but not exact.

Movie theaters used to have curtains that would move in/out and down to exactly frame the image. If not - you would have seen the "black bars" in movie theaters as well.

Because of this - you sometimes see black bars on all sides with 1 movie, and only small bars on others. It depends on the ratio the movie was filmed in.

Answer 2

Widescreen TV is in 16:9 aspect ratio. The width to height ratio is 16:9. Standard TV is in 4:3 aspect ratio. When the TV fills the screen top to bottom with a 4:3 picture, it is left with areas on both sides that are blank. In some sets, these are displayed as black. There are others that display as gray. Most TVs have several modes where, in one way or another, this blank area is filled in with picture. In one way, the picture is just stretched to the left and right to fill-in the sides. But this distorts the picture. Everybody looks fat.Another way is to make the picture bigger, until the sides are filled-in, but then the top and bottom of the picture is off the screen; but nothing is distorted. Bottom line, the problem is, you can't show a part of the picture that was never taped in the first place. Things get even more complicated for films. Motion pictures are filmed in a variety of aspect ratios. Some of them are a lot wider than 16:9. On standard 4:3 TVs, these were often shown by just cutting off both sides. If you properly show a movie on a 16:9 screen, it's in what's called, letterbox. The film is shown full width; but since it's aaspect ratio is greater than 16:9, the top and bottom of the screen have to be left blank-or black. Again, most TVs can fill this in, but everybody will look thin because the picture will be stretched, top and bottom.
So, TVs generally can eliminate the bars, but because they can't show you parts of the picture that were never taped or filmed, they can only do it by stretching the picture and distorting it, or leaving part of it off-screen.
Shows that are taped in 16:9 aspect ratio, can be displayed in full screen with no problem.