So, Im at Best Buy this morning (dropping off my computer which I may be without for a few weeks now).. and I go foff to buy my DVD's (Napoleon Dynamite, Shaun of the Dead, and Jackie Brown for 9.99)

Whats the deal between Full Screen and Widescreen. From the word on the street, everyone these days is a videphile and prefers Widescreen because it most closely replicates the what ya see on the movie screen....That sounds great.. why wouldnt everyone want that?

Yet, we still see double versions of movies being released nin both formats....On the Napoleon Dynamite DVD, it presents both the full screen and widescreen on one disk...

why? WHY WHY WHY?

Any of you 'Full Screen' fans?

Im not enough of a videophile where it truly makes a difference....if widescreen is available i get that one.. if it is not, i barely blink and get fullscreen....

what are the movie companies doing to us?

Wide Screen is clearly superior, but you still get people who complain about the "black bars" on the screen. I don't get it, but they're out there.

Well, it's wierd, I admit that Widescreen is better for most movie viewing because it does replicate the theatrical release without "pan and scan" or other editing tricks.

However, since the widescreen movie phenomenon has happened a lot of people seem to think widescreen is inherently superior to normal TV ratio for everything. That's not the case at all. TV shows and movies that were filmed in the standard ration are just fine and don't lack anything because they weren't filmed in widescreen.

i cant stand full screen editions.
the argument people usually give is that they get 'more' on the screen so they feel like they're getting more for their buck.
what they dont realise is that not only do you actually get less of the actual picture, but you can get stuck with that pan and scan crap, which is so fucking distracting i usually can't even sit through it.

Napoleon Dynamite is only $9.99?

I've been wanting to see this.

oops, sorry... it was 15.99

Jackie Brown was 9.99

and for the record, Shaun of the dead was 19.99

certain movies simply look better in widescreen, especially ones with beautiful cinematography.

also, more pple are making the move to widescreen televisions.

Maybe the first couple of times you watch a widescreen movie it might bug you. After that you'll never go back.

Steve

It makes a hugh difference. Full screen is basically chopping up the director and cinematographers vision of what the scene should look like.

I actually watched a little ad on Turner classic movies where they were showing Steinbeck's "East of Eden" with James Dean a while back. It showed a scene of a train coming into town in full screen. Then it showed the same scene in widescreen and you see that James Dean is peeking around a building slowly. You never see this in full screen.


Also, in "Contact" with Jodie Foster, the scene where the president is making the announcement of their findings we see a few of the actors lined up against the wall. In widescreen you see the mainactors plus about 12 other reporters lined up against the wall with them.

full screen blows.

Yeah, the most noticable full screen tragedy is the chariot race from Ben Hur.

It is sooooo much better in widescreen.

The last two DVDs I've bought were labeled widescreen and were full screen. I was annoyed.

that happened to me with 'i am trying to break your heart'
they succeeded.

Office Space and a bunch of cool movies are 9.99 at Best Buy.

Right on Brother Derris.

Also, I think I'd rather get hit repeatedly in the balls than watch a movie with pan & scan.

Moive companies are wasting precious space and resources on a clearly unneccesary format then... Kill FullScreen already for newe movies...

If you have a 13" television screen space is hot property so maybe full screen would be beneficial. I'm all about the wide screen however.

Same goes for photography. 35mm negs are always cropped to fit the 4x6, 5x7, or 8x10 size print. Anyway, that's my little side rant.

The full screen versions are slowly going away in DVD Land as more and more people understand the reason for widescreen and as more people buy widescreen TVs.

(Sidenote: My parents bought an HDTV set, and it's all sorts of cool, but I've got to say that sumo wrestling in HDTV is just wrong.)

But there are pan and scan fans out there; the reason you don't hear from them is they're not as likely to obsess over it and post on message boards about it.

One reason some people prefer the pan-n-scan is that if your TV is smaller than, say, 27", widescreen movies are annoyingly small on the screen, especially the extra wide 2.35:1 flicks (Ben Hur, at 2.75:1, would be a tiny ribbon of picture).

As far as the movie studios are concerned, they still have to do pan + scan transfers for eventual TV broadcast, so it doesn't really cost them any more to throw that pan and/or scan version on the DVD along with the widescreen version and give people the choice.

So there you go.

I saw a commerical for the RoTK DVD, which was in widescreen, and the image was tiny as hell. It's making me think twice about buying the extended trilogy, as I don't want to sit two feet away from the TV in order to see what's going on.

Most widescreen movies are fine on my TV, though. Are the LoTRs moves extra wide screen, or was it just me seeing poorly that day?

If you have a small screen, full screen is nice. If your screen is already small, losing half of it to black bars is annoying.

The widescreen is good for movies with great wide shots and all, but for many movies it's wasted. If the cinematogrqaphy isn't worth seeing, which as often as not it isn't to me, I'm hapier using my full screen.

The Lord of the Rings movies (and plenty of others) are extra wide, with a ratio of width to height of 2.35:1.

All movies made before 1953 were 1.33:1, which regular TV screens were designed to match. Starting in 1953, they started making films in various degrees of widescreen, the most common being 1:85:1 (new widescreen TV screens are 1.78:1, almost the same size) and 2.35:1.

Here's a comparison:



So around 43% of the screen on something extra-wide like Lord of the Rings would be black bars on a regular TV set.

I don't know why they still make full-screen.

My mom likes full screen because her MS has made her vision very blurry. This way it's easier for her to follow the film.

I love widescreen and have only made the mistake of purchasing a full screen version once. It was the Full Screen of Lost in Translation and it still bugs me to no end. I'm going to have to buy the wide screen version and toss the full screen. Sooner than Later.

I always double check now.

For a couple months, I would just grab a copy of whatever DVD at Best Buy and then, once I was halfway to the car, discover it was Full Screen and then have to go back inside. The thing is, they would make me stand in the returns line to do it. Once it got to a certain point, my boss thought I was making up excuses for getting back late for lunch - I had to literally show him my ammended reciept once.

Damn them full screeners...

Widescreen is just so much better. Especially if you have a big flatscreen tv- it makes SUCH a difference.

I'm not such a videophile where I go out and buy DVD's, I probably own 3 at the most- oh the travesty! But when I do watch something, I'm all about widescreen.