Quote:
Originally Posted by LoganSnake
What irks me more are wide formatted movies that STILL have black bars on a 16:9 screen. There is no excuse for that.
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Actually, there is.
Standard definition television is produced, naturally, in 4:3; feature films, on the other hand, are usually in either 1.85:1 (37:20, when expressed as an integer ratio) or occasionally 2.39:1 (~12:5). 16:9 was chosen as the high definition format because it's the most efficient aspect ratio that accommodates all the others -- in other words, it's the format that wastes the least amount of screen space for any of the common aspect ratios.
Hypothetically, anything other than actual high definition television programming should be letterboxed to some extent, but in practice the film producers frequently crop the image to fit your screen.