You're top must have in widescreen letterbox movies.

Matrix movies

LOTR extended versions

Joe Vs the Volcano

Independence Day

 

Some directors. . . but too many these days shoot with airplane and TV in mind, especially dramas and comedies. It's really obvious on most HDTV content in which nothing is happening on the outside 25% of the screen. So often you're not really missing anything.

 

What exactly do you think is "new" about HDTV and the 16x9 aspect ratio??? CBS has been broadcasting prime time shows in HD since 2000, and 16x9 HDTVs have been available for even longer.

The salesman you talked to didn't know what he was talking about. Most TV dramas, including those that were never broadcast in HD, are shot on film in wide aspect-ratio. Scripted TV shows today are still shot on film but mastered in HD. Exceptions are rare, like Northern Exposure, which was shot on film in 4x3, which is why it appears in OAR on HDNet as 4x3.

Edit: Clarification: above is only true for shows produced in the last ten years. Point I was trying to make is that many shows that people have been viewing in the past ten years as 4x3 were actually produced in widescreen HD (and viewable that way since 2000).

 

What do you think has changed???

Shows that were originally shot with 4:3 aspect ratio will be pillarboxed (if that was the director's intent), as they have been since DVDs were introduced. Nothing has changed, you can still watch them in the original aspect ratio.

Go to The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and look up your favorite show and click on "Technical Specs". That will tell you what aspect ratio the show was originally shot in. For instance, I looked up "X-Files" and it was shot in 4:3 for the first four seasons (1993 thru 1996 season), but 16:9 after that (1997 and beyond).

 

The term I've heard is "windowboxed," but I imagine that either is acceptable.

There are several possible ways that TVs handle the different aspect ratios (and usually there are at least a couple options on all TVs). My TV has three basic options:

1. View in 16x9, which would stretch any 4x3 signals on it, making the people look very fat but would look great for 16x9 content
2. View in 4x3 which will windowbox the 4x3 content and make the 16x9 people look very thin (although there's NO reason why you would choose this option for 16x9 content).
3. Zoom in. The only time that you would want to do this is if the program was shot in 16x9, but then the TV channels broadcast a 4x3 letterboxed signal (this does happen occasionally), or if you're watching some 16x9 program that was recorded on a 4x3 source (i.e. non-HD Tivo).

Fancier TVs have options for dynamic zoom and/or stretching, but mine only has three basic options.

Edit: I realized I didn't exactly answer your question. Whether or not it will do it "automatically" depends on the TV and DVD player, but all 16x9 TVs should have the options to watch something windowboxed, stretch the image (so everyone looks fat), and to zoom (i.e. cut of the top and the bottom, in your example).

 

It probably depends on the TV set. On my Sanyo Aquos and DirecTV receiver, I can choose from three settings when viewing 4:3 content. Pillar box (where the picture appears as it does on an SD set), stretch (where picture fills the screen and everyone looks as if they put on a few pounds) and crop (where the top and bottom are cut off).

Edit: having read Betelgeuse' response which was posted as I was composing mine, the above settings are for SD content only. The set automatically adjusts back to 16:9 when watching HD contents.

 

You imagine wrong. Windowboxing is when you get black bars on all four sides. This is typically seen when you have your system set up to pillarbox 4:3 content, and then you view a standard definition (4:3) signal source that is sending letterboxed content.

Pillarboxing is when you have a vertical bar on either side of the active picture area, but none above or below the active picture (picture extends to the edge at the top and bottom).

 

I think I'd trust anything I read on the web before I'd trust what a salesman told me. There's a 99.5% chance the salesman was wrong about that particular TV, and 100% chance he was wrong when talking about widescreen LCD TVs in general. I've never seen a widescreen TV set that did not have a setting to pillarbox 4:3 material, thus preserving its original aspect ratio. Such a TV might exist, but they've got to be rare if I've never heard of it after participating on AVSForum since 2000.

As others have said, your DVD player and TV will enable at least options 1, 2, and 4, and possibly other options for viewing 4:3 content on a 16:9 display:

1) Preserve OAR by pillarboxing the 4x3 content
2) Linearly zoom the 4x3 content in the horizontal direction to fit the screen, thus making everyone equally fat no matter where they are on the screen
3) Non-linearly zoom the 4x3 content in the horizontal direction to fit the screen, making people appear normal in the center of the screen, and fat at the sides, and introducing interesting distortions as people's heads move from the center to edge of the screen (stock tickers do interesting things too as the words move across the screen).
4) Linearly zoom the 4x3 content in both horizontal and vertical directions, thus losing some of the content above and below the visible picture.
5) Some combination of linear/non-linear zoom and cropping.

 

Our TV also has a non-linear stretch (can't remember what they call it; maybe Super Stretch) which stretches the image towards the edges. It still fills the entire screen, but the center is not stretched, while the distortion is greater toward the edges. The idea is that most of the action is in the middle of the frame, so you leave that undistorted, while the edges are mostly background. Personally, I don't like any sort of stretching, but prefer to box.

Tom

 

Adding to the list:

2001
Cleopatra - the Liz Taylor one
The Alamo - the recent one - one of the largest sets ever made.
Saving Private Ryan

 

Grand Prix
2001 A Space Odyssey
Baraka
If you like incredible cinematography without storyline.It about nature and cultures.
List of 70 mm films - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia