Dan Kaplan
Stunt Coordinator
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2002
- Messages
- 159
The following is excerpted from a post of mine in the Home Theater Software forum. It was suggested that I ask it here, which is obviously a more appropriate location.
I recently got a CRT projector and have been experimenting with various things. There is a brochure for it (Barco 708s) which alludes to a 16x9 mode in addition to the native 4x3, but I haven't been able to find reference to that anywhere else. I've got my screen sized to 1.78:1, so I figured I'd experiment with the DVD player's widescreen setting. I didn't know if the projector would somehow know to treat the incoming source as widescreen and not squeeze it down further with the addition of doubled up (?) black bars, thus increasing vertical resolution, or if it would treat it as a standard 4x3 signal and make a mess of things. To my surprise, the 2.35:1 disc I tried out in that mode was expanded to fill the 1.78:1 (or 1.85:1, depending on how you look at it) area. Does that make sense? I couldn't figure out what exactly was happening... I was expecting it to either look right or be scrunched down vertically (the addition of extra black bar treatment), not stretched.
So, is the best approach to leave the DVD player in letterbox mode and always send the projector a 4x3 signal to work with? And if I do it that way, how exactly does anamorphic come into play, if at all?