Widescreen TV Information and Help

It wasn't until the 1950s that movies began to "widen out". A standard theater size ratio became 15x9. In fact, if you watch the Beatles 6-set DVD, you can hear Ringo Starr talking about the very first time he saw a wide movie and how much it impressed him.

So after that point, for about 50 years there, a discrepancy existed between TV screen sizes and movie screen sizes. Movies were wider than TVs were. People who saw movies on their TV were only seeing a "chopped" version. This led to all sorts of problems - you would have characters off-screen that were supposed to be on screen, and lose vital parts of the scenery.

In came the widescreen TVs which finally restored the TV to match the movie dimensions. This means that you do get to see the characters or scenery shown in the original film, without having any bits cut off. The "pan and scan" technique, where they slide the image left and right to try to focus on the important parts, will always be cutting off almost 50% of the image! That can mean some VERY critical action can be completely missing from what you can see. I have always hated "chopped" versions of movies for this reason and have opted for the widescreen version whenever possible.

Note that widescreen TVs *can* be both "standard resolution" (480 lines) or "high definition" (1080 lines). The high definition TVs of course provide a higher quality image.

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Note - Lisa Shea wrote this content for the genealogy site at BellaOnline.com - you might still find this content there as well. That's fine :) I gave permission!