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Anamorphic
Anamorphic DVD transfers, often labed as "Enhanced for 16x9 Televisions" offer the highest picture quality possible from the DVD format. Essentially, a 16x9 frame is compressed horizontally when transferred to DVD, and uncompressed upon playback by a widescreen television or video projector, reducing the amount of resolution lost to matting for widescreen presentations. This process increases the image's vertical resolution by 33%, and nearly eliminates visible scan lines. On a standard 4:3 television, the film will be horizontally compressed, with actors and scenery appearing tall and thin. To compensate for this effect on 4:3 televisions, DVD players remove every fourth vertical line and place black bars above and below the resultant active image (this technique is called anamorphic downconversion). The result is an image that appears normal on standard televisions. Different players perform this task with varying degrees of success. Simply discarding every fourth line will result in a sharp image, but with obvious aliasing and video artifacts, while more sophisticated digital interpolation techniques eliminate these artifacts, but may produce an image that appears subjectively soft.
