Why is hd widescreen

Television broadcasting stayed with the standard, until the recent move to HDTV and widescreen. Some models can also display SD standard definition video signals, but this will require some compromises, as you will read below.

Nearly all experts agree that in order to display optimal video images, it is critical to match the aspect ratio of the monitor to the aspect ratio of the camera or other incoming video source. Below is a example of a image on a widescreen lcd monitor:. Therefore, to display clear, undistorted video images, it is important to utilize monitors with the same aspect ratio to match the cameras.

Failure to do so will result in distorted images, as shown below. But why was it and not or ? To know why, we have to rewind back to when Thomas Edison invented film and had to determine the image ratio for his film. Since the sprocket perforation of his lab equipment had a ratio of , he finalized it as the ratio for the full frame as well.

When TVs became mainstream by s due to aggressive marketing by companies like Sony, Panasonic and Motorola yes, Motorola was one of the pioneers in Television industry back then and almost every home in US could afford a TV, the entertainment industry began to witness a dramatic shift in the viewing habits of consumers. People preferred to watch TV at home rather than going to a theater and this set alarm bells ringing in the Hollywood industry which had to come up with something new to bring back people to theaters.

Hollywood industry had to be something different compared to the home television. Since there was no standards body, several aspect ratios started cropping up across different film houses, some of the popular ones being Panavision ratio of 2.

In example B shown above, we properly maintain the correct aspect ratio by padding the sides with empty black space. The problem with this is that most people would get frustrated with the fact that they just bought big widescreen HDTV and they don't get to use the full screen. The truth of the matter is, displaying a standard definition 4x3 ratio image on a newer widescreen TV probably looks better when the image is smaller because the artifacts aren't as noticeable.

But many people would rather fill the entire screen and get quantity over quality. Option C above is unfortunately one of the more popular choices that people make because it fills the entire screen. To fill a widescreen with a 4x3 image, we have to stretch the image and completely disregard the aspect ratio.

But a lot of people just say "so what, I just want to fill the screen". When a person's head in the image is level, that person will just look fatter and it's less obvious that something is wrong with the image. But once the head is slightly tilted in our examples, it becomes rapidly apparent that something is really wrong because the head is skewed. Either way, image stretching is the ugliest option available and it drives me up the wall when I see public places showing stretched fat TV like this.

It's almost bad enough to give me a headache looking at a distorted image. The end result is that you get your full widescreen filled with an image without distortion but you do crop a little off the top and bottom.

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