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Widescreen televisions provide several modes for displaying video from 4:3 (standard aspect ratio) sources. These modes may be selected manually from a remote control, or automatically if an Active Format Description is available.
Normal mode frames the 4:3 video to the 16:9 picture area by displaying it in its original aspect ratio, with vertical gray or black bars on both sides of the screen. The disadvantage of this method is the fact that the image is small by virtue of not using the entire width of the screen. This is also known as the 4:3 mode.
Full mode horizontally stretches the 4:3 video evenly across the entire width of the screen. This is the proper mode to display anamorphic video. If used for standard aspect ratio video, everything on the screen will appear wider than normal. Contrast this with anamorphic video displayed without processing on a 4:3 display, in which people on the screen will appear taller than normal. This is also known as the 16:9 mode.
Zoom mode evenly stretches the picture both horizontally and vertically, until the picture fills the entire width of the screen. This crops out the top and bottom of the picture. This mode is used for letterboxed and open matte video.
In 14:9 mode, the picture is magnified more than in Normal mode, but less than in Zoom mode, while retaining the original aspect ratio.
Wide Zoom mode, also called Just mode, Horizon, or Smart Stretch, progressively stretches the picture horizontally, less in the middle and more on the edges. This allows normal aspect ratio video to be displayed across the entire width of the screen, with minimal cropping, and with much less of the unpleasing visual stretching effect of Full mode.
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Letter-boxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting video-graphic image has mattes of empty space above and below it; these mattes are part of each frame of the video signal.
Pan and scan is a method of adjusting widescreen film images so that they can be shown in fullscreen proportions of a standard-definition 4:3 aspect ratio television screen, often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image to focus on the composition's most important aspects.
Standard-definition television is a television system that uses a resolution that is not considered to be either high or enhanced definition. Standard refers to offering a similar resolution to the analog broadcast systems used when it was introduced.
Widescreen images are displayed within a set of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than 4:3 (12:9).
Computer display standards are a combination of aspect ratio, display size, display resolution, color depth, and refresh rate. They are associated with specific expansion cards, video connectors, and monitors. These standards encompass various aspects of the display, including resolution, refresh rate, color depth, and connectivity.
Anamorphic widescreen is a process by which a comparatively wide widescreen image is horizontally compressed to fit into a storage medium with a narrower aspect ratio, reducing the horizontal resolution of the image while keeping its full original vertical resolution. Compatible play-back equipment can then expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen image. This is typically used to allow one to store widescreen images on a medium that was originally intended for a narrower ratio, while using as much of the frame – and therefore recording as much detail – as possible.
Negative pulldown is the manner in which an image is exposed on a film stock, described by the number of film perforations spanned by an individual frame. It can also describe whether the image captured on the negative is oriented horizontally or vertically. Changing the number of exposed perforations allows a cinematographer to change both the aspect ratio of the image and the size of the area on the film stock that the image occupies.
Open matte is a filming technique that involves matting out the top and bottom of the film frame in the movie projector for the widescreen theatrical release and then scanning the film without a matte for a full screen home video release. It is roughly equivalent to an uncropped version of the film.
The pillarbox effect occurs in widescreen video displays when black bars are placed on the sides of the image. It becomes necessary when film or video that was not originally designed for widescreen is shown on a widescreen display, or a narrower widescreen image is displayed within a wider aspect ratio, such as a 16:9 image in a 2.39:1 frame. The original material is shrunk and placed in the middle of the widescreen frame.
Nominal analogue blanking is the outermost part of the overscan of a standard definition digital television image. It consists of a gap of black pixels at the left and right sides, which correspond to the end and start of the horizontal blanking interval: the front porch at the right side, and the back porch at the left side. Digital television ordinarily contains 720 pixels per line, but only 702 (PAL) to 704 (NTSC) of them contain picture content. The location is variable, since analogue equipment may shift the picture sideways in an unexpected amount or direction.
A Pixel aspect ratio is a mathematical ratio that describes how the width of a pixel in a digital image compared to the height of that pixel.
Windowboxing in the display of film or video occurs when the aspect ratio of the media is such that the letterbox effect and pillarbox effect occur simultaneously. Sometimes, by accident or design, a standard ratio image is presented in the central portion of a letterbox picture, resulting in a black border all around. It is generally disliked because it wastes much screen space and reduces the resolution of the original image. It can occur when a 16:9 film is set to 4:3 (letterbox), but then shown on a 16:9 TV or other output device. It can also occur in the opposite direction and a few films have been released with this aspect ratio — one example is The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course, which had numerous scenes with Steve & Terri Irwin using widescreen pillar boxing.
Anamorphic format is the cinematography technique of shooting a widescreen picture on standard 35 mm film or other visual recording media with a non-widescreen native aspect ratio. It also refers to the projection format in which a distorted image is "stretched" by an anamorphic projection lens to recreate the original aspect ratio on the viewing screen. The word anamorphic and its derivatives stem from the Greek anamorphoo, compound of morphé with the prefix aná. In the late 1990s and 2000s, anamorphic lost popularity in comparison to "flat" formats such as Super 35 with the advent of digital intermediates; however, in the years since digital cinema cameras and projectors have become commonplace, anamorphic has experienced a considerable resurgence of popularity, due in large part to the higher base ISO sensitivity of digital sensors, which facilitates shooting at smaller apertures.
The technology of television has evolved since its early days using a mechanical system invented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884. Every television system works on the scanning principle first implemented in the rotating disk scanner of Nipkow. This turns a two-dimensional image into a time series of signals that represent the brightness and color of each resolvable element of the picture. By repeating a two-dimensional image quickly enough, the impression of motion can be transmitted as well. For the receiving apparatus to reconstruct the image, synchronization information is included in the signal to allow proper placement of each line within the image and to identify when a complete image has been transmitted and a new image is to follow.
The display aspect ratio (or DAR) is the aspect ratio of a display device and so the proportional relationship between the physical width and the height of the display. It is expressed as two numbers separated by a colon (x:y), where x corresponds to the width and y to the height. Common aspect ratios for displays, past and present, include 5:4, 4:3, 16:10, and 16:9.
"21:9" is a consumer electronics (CE) marketing term to describe the ultrawide aspect ratio of 64:27, designed to show films recorded in CinemaScope and equivalent modern anamorphic formats. The main benefit of this screen aspect ratio is a constant display height when displaying other content with a lesser aspect ratio.
The graphics display resolution is the width and height dimension of an electronic visual display device, measured in pixels. This information is used for electronic devices such as a computer monitor. Certain combinations of width and height are standardized and typically given a name and an initialism which is descriptive of its dimensions. A graphics display resolution can be used in tandem with the size of the graphics display to calculate pixel density. An increase in the pixel density often correlates with a decrease in the size of individual pixels on a display.
The aspect ratio of an image is the ratio of its width to its height. It is expressed as two numbers separated by a colon, width:height. Common aspect ratios are 1.85:1 and 2.40:1 in cinematography, 4:3 and 16:9 in television, and 3:2 in still photography.
In first person video games, the field of view or field of vision is the extent of the observable game world that is seen on the display at any given moment. It is typically measured as an angle, although whether this angle is the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal component of the field of view varies from game to game.