I don't personally like widescreen that much. When I say extremely widescreen DVDs I mean 2.35:1 or 2.40:1 or 2.45:1, I don't mean 1.85:1. I think widescreen DVDs are overrated and I much prefer full-screen except in the case of special effect movies. Sometimes big action, special effects movies look better when they are widescreen, like Armageddon and Deep Impact.

Honestly, I just get whatever BlockBuster has. We have a Big WideScreen TV, so it really doesn't affect me much.. as far as I knew, all DVDs had a WideScreen option.

some movies are really hard to watch letterboxed, particularly movies released before video that use the whole aspect ratio of the movie screen.ever see a kung fu movie on t.v. and the whole fight seems to happen off screen and all you can see is the hands and legs fighting in the mioddle"? and you thought it was because the cameraman was drunk? well, the cameraman probably WAS drunk but they'd actually framed the fight to take advantage of the anamorphic screen in a lot of cases. ditto a lot of godzilla movies.

now they make movies delibnerately so that most of the action takes place in the middle of the screen, which i find a bit of a drag.

I never liked widescreen, but I've gotten used to it.  Most of the older DVD's from like the 90s and older come in a widescreen only format.  Newly released ones often come with a choice, which I like

I don't personally like widescreen that much. When I say extremely widescreen DVDs I mean 2.35:1 or 2.40:1 or 2.45:1, I don't mean 1.85:1. I think widescreen DVDs are overrated and I much prefer full-screen except in the case of special effect movies. Sometimes big action, special effects movies look better when they are widescreen, like Armageddon and Deep Impact.


I always try to buy in the screen ratio originally intended by the director. 

For everything before the mid-50s that's standard 'Academy' ratio (1.37:1), but about that time 35mm projection in the U.S. standardized at 1.85:1 (U.S.) and 1.66:1 (Europe) for flat, anamorphic films, and 2.35:1 (U.S.) and 2.35:1 (Europe) for Cinema-Scope, Panavision and other anamorphic production techniques, not to mention the 1.33:1 ratio for items made for television but available now on DVD.

When movies began to be shown on television in the mid-50s, the pan-and-scan technique was developed.  Anamorphic widescreen movies lose 20 to 28% of the original image when subjected to this technique.  Amorphic widescreen movies lose 44 to 48%.  Sometimes the action is not all in the same 52% of the screen, and you end up with John Wayne's nose talking to Robert Stack's ear in a crucial scene in The High and the Mighty, and artificial editing patterns imposed upon films by technicians and engineers who had nothing to do with the original work. 

To me, good movies are art and I don't want a framing technician recutting a favorite director's work of art, any more than I want someone at the frame shop deciding what part of the Mona Lisa I should be looking at. 

Some directors, including David Lynch, James Cameron, John Carpenter, Brian De Palma, and Ridley Scott, use the full width of the widescreen frame, with characters and/or crucial details at its extreme edges.  George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, among others, have begun to insist that their films be released only in letterbox format, which preserves the original aspect ratio, and with the growing acceptance of letterboxing by the viewing public, more directors have begun using the widescreen format as originally intended and are composing shots in such a way as to fully utilize the frame.

Many DVDs come with both the original and the standard formats on opposite sides of one disc, so you can take a movie originally shot widescreen and view it both ways and see the difference in both information conveyed and artistic composition for yourself.

I'm pulling information from the book American Cinema/American Culture by John Belton because this stuff matters to me but I haven't memorized all the numbers.  I just follow my 'originally intended ratio' rule.  It works for me.

I only buy DVDs in the widescreen format.  I hate fullscreen.

i don't mind fullscreen if it's some goofy action movie (aside from the aforementioned kung fu movies) or a jim carrey flick or whatnot. but if it's 2001: a space odyssey or close encounters i'ma want the whole aspect ratio.

the flip side is, compared to film, the fidelity/resolution of video is actually really poor. there's only a few hundred horizontal scan lines and if you look close an image breaks up into pixels in video in a way it doesn't on film. letterbox makes this problem a lot worse.