Over at Sound and Vision Mag they’re asking exactly this question, and there’s a lot of logic behind it. Current flat-screen TV tech favours the 16:9 (or 1.78:1) dimension ratio, but many movies are shot in Cinemascope 2.35:1, around 32% wider. That’s why you still see letterboxing on your HDTV, or the frames are cropped to fit. High-end home theatre projectors already cater for Cinemascope dimensions by using anamorphic lenses and some fancy processing to correct the image. So will next-gen home TVs end up wider too?
The experts Sound and Vision asked tended to think not, with both Toshiba and Sony confirming they had no plans in this direction. Partly it’s a question of manufacturing: the tooling is set up for production of TVs in 16:9, which mainly concerns the production of LCD panels (or OLED panels that’re in the pipeline), and changing that would be pretty expensive. As a Samsung expert points out this even affects things like the glass used for the panels: manufactures are used to particular dimensions and achieving a particular yield from a “mother” sheet of glass… changing the screen dimensions would involve adjusting all this production too. And of course there’s all the tech involved in getting 2.35:1 images onto the screen in the first place: DVDs and BDs aren’t that ratio, though you could achieve it by throwing away pixels.
But all of these problems are not insurmountable. And I, for one, would welcome the idea of a “full” widescreen TV sitting in my living room in four or five years time: maybe because I mainly watch movies rather than TV shows. What’s your take on the idea, guys?
[Sound and Vision Mag]
John
Thursday, July 24, 2008 at 8:22 AMI see a lot of comments about pillarboxed views and dislike of this. Don’t you realise that in a cinema there are black curtains on the left and right of the screen that are pulled in and out to adjust the aspect from 4:3 to 16:9 to 2.35:1 etc. I believe that’s pillarboxing isn’t it?
Rohan Fisher
Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 4:06 AMI am lucky to be the owner of a Sharp Aquos Bluray player, and accept 2.35 ratio right up to 4.0. Ten years, I remembered reading about Philips flat panel TVs. It has taken ten years for Philips to come up with the 2.35 TV set. I think it is ridiculous for TV makers to make 1.78 TV sets, when most movies are 2.35. However, if these 21.9 TV sets are going to be slightly future proofed, they will need to process 2160i. Ten years ago, we were happy with a 576i DVD player. But in today’s 1080i world, a standard DVD is absolute crap. To conclude my argument, 21.9 TV will have to process 2160i video. I can’t wait to see what 2160i world would looks like.
Rohan Fisher
Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 2:15 PMManufactures of TV sets and optical media should come together, so within ten years ultra wide screen sets become common place. My Sharp Aquos blu ray player can be set to play on ultra wide TV sets. But there is no point of going ultra wide, until TV sets have a resolution of 2160p. And to play 2160p discs manufactures have to standardize (beyond blu ray) discs – in other words 500Gb discs that can be read by green or ultra violet lasers. And would HDMI 3 be capable of transmitting 2160p?