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widescreen or standard displays, pan and scan discs
will work in the same way as standard 1.37:1 films.
Letterboxed Discs
Since all DVD players can convert a widescreen disc
to display properly on a standard video display,
there is no technical reason to make a letterboxed
disc. However in the early days of DVD, movie
studios were selling to a much smaller audience of
DVD player owners. Instead of making a new
transfer to DVD in widescreen format, to save
money they would use an existing transfer that had
been made for the laser disc format. Since laser disc
had no provision for widescreen films, these transfers
were done in letterboxed format, where the black
bars at the top and bottom of the image were added
to the disc itself during the transfer process.
These letterboxed discs will display properly on a
standard display. However, on a widescreen display
you will not only see black bars at the top and
bottom of the image from the letterboxing process
on the disc itself, but the display will add additional
black bars at the sides of the image to maintain the
correct picture geometry. The final result is a very
small picture centered on your screen.
Most widescreen displays have a “zoom” mode that
will expand the image in all four directions to fill
the screen. However, the picture resolution suffers as
many of the available pixels on the disc have been
discarded. Fortunately as the market for DVDs have
grown these types of discs are now rarely seen.
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