Don't get me wrong. I can get my heart pumping at the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still at 1080p! The clarity is amazing. My problem is that I enjoy the DVD version of '"Batman Begins" better than my blu-ray version as the Blu-Ray's are almost all widescreen versions. When the movies show in HD on my cable they are almost never letterboxed. Comcast seems to know that people hate letterboxing so why hasn’t Blu-Ray caught on? Are they all intellectuals!? Or, maybe the Blu-Ray format doesn’t have enough capacity to hold a long 1080p movie not letteboxed?
Bob
This has been discussed in AVS forums to death. I believe the reason is about video purity. Since movies are like works of art, they want to show the film the way the directors meant it to be shown. Unfortunately, the wider aspect ratio of 2.35:1 that movie directors prefer is not the same standard that HDTV adopted which is 1.78:1. The reason for this is because 1.78:1 is wide enough for most TV shows. But movie directors want the wider angle to capture more information on the screen. Did you notice that most comedy movies are in 1.78:1 aspect ratio?
Bottom line is: if audiophiles want a stereo recording to be as close as possible to the original. It's the same logic with movies, they want the picture to be the same format as the original. Stretching or cropping the picture would be like altering the stereo recording by using those fake matrix effects.
As an alternative though, Blu-ray players or TV can have user selectable stretching modes just like receivers have a 5 channel stereo or those simulated surround modes.
