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As the world slowly moves to digital TV, we
are seeing more and more TV sets becoming available in the wide
screen format. The main advantage of wide screen TV is pretty
obvious as you get more picture to watch, but it
also makes your set a bit more compatible with modern day films.
The size of most films produced since the 1950s is often
referred
to a 16:9 aspect ratio, this means the picture
is 16 units wide to 9 units high. The unit could be any size, if
in a cinema a unit could be a 1 to 2 foot where
each unit of a TV could be 1 to 2 inches or less for example. In
comparison to today's cinemas TV sets have always been a 4:3 aspect ratio until the introduction of wide
screen sets.
The incompatibility between TV and Cinema Sizes wasn't due to a
lack of vision from the designers of the first
TVs. In fact, the designers of the first TVs did set out to
match the size of cinemas screens as back in those
days cinema screens were in the 4:3 aspect ratio.
The 4:3 aspect ratio dates back to the first days of cinema when
Thomas Edison's company started producing their
film with 1 inch wide and 3/4 inch wide frames. As Edison was
the first to produce motion pictures, it was this
size everyone else adopted.
Cinemas were big business in the early part of the last century,
but as the craze of television hit the need to
go out to the cinema dropped dramatically. Cinemas responded by
improving the cinema experience, this is what
led to wide screen formats like Vistavision, Cinerama and
Cinemascope. On a side note, one interesting gimmick was
Perspecta sound, an early surround sound system that moved the
mono sound across the screen via 3 speakers and
equipment that could detect sub-audible tones under the
soundtrack.
In order to make movies fit into our existing 4:3 sets, studios
either use a letterbox or pan and scan method to
present the film. A letterbox film refers to the black bars on
the top and the bottom of the screen, its a trade
off with you losing a bit of picture size but retaining the
whole 16:9 format in order to see the film as the
director intended. The pan and scan method involves the studio
watching the film and cutting out parts of either
sides of the screen with no action in it, before releasing it as
a video or DVD. Its a method that works well
but it is not really the way the picture was meant to be seen.
As many countries are now moving to digital
TV transmission, the new wide screen format is now being
introduced and is really starting to take off. It is envisioned
that in the next 10 years the price of plasma and LCD TVs drop
to a point where they are cheaper to produce than CRT TVs. When
this happens it will be almost impossible to buy an old 4:3
aspect ratio set, and you would not want one way as every TV
program broadcasted will be in wide screen 16:9 size.
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