Full or Wide screen? What's your preference?

[Suet Seung]

To watch movies on DVD, what's your preference: full screen or widescreen? Why is one better than the other?

[Ken Cheng]

Full screen. Widescreen works well if you're in a cinema or own a huge TV, but my little 16-inch deal only makes the picture look that much smaller on widescreen.

[LuNaR]

full screen

[Ren Wo Xing]

Widescreen, because of my 22 inch 226BW Samsung flatscreen computer monitor IS a widescreen monitor...

[john-e]

Wide screen. I watched a program recently on how movies are reduced for full screen - there's a technical term that I can't remember. It showed wide-screen clips from Ben Hur and Lawrence of Arabia with the full screen frame overtop and how the editor moved it around to capture the best parts. It was interesting to see how much of the picture is cut off for the full screen version.

[SkyKing]

i love WS more than FS....but too bad most of my TV are FS...

[annaaa]

full screen cos i think widescreen stretches the things out.

[ghostdarTeal'c]

full screen.....but i like wide screen too so....

[oGaKirA]

To watch movies on DVD, what's your preference: full screen or widescreen? Why is one better than the other?

Widescreen. As John mentions, movies edited for fullscreen are missing viewable areas. And one can watch a widescreen dvd fine on a regular tv granted your tv is an ok size. You'll just have that black area on top and bottum.

full screen cos i think widescreen stretches the things out.

no it doesn't babe.

[Dagger Lee]

Widescreen is better since I do own a widescreen HDTV and theatrical movies are shot in widescreen. Fullscreen takes out a bit of the image.

[resident:alien]

WIDESCREEN for me. All films are shot in WIDESCREEN. However, in order to fit it for TV, it is edited for FULLSCREEN.

[atlantean0208]

You don't say it fullscreen, its 4:3, if you have a 16:9 tv you also have a fullscreen for widescreen get it . You were saying it fullscreen because most tv are 4:3, to show movies in 16:9 resolution they need to crop a little at both left and right side to make it a 4:3 for 4:3 tv.

However if widescreen need to be retained (no cropping) then a technique called pan and scan is apply, to show the movie in its original 16:9 resolution in a 4:3 tv. This technique you will see black rectangle at the bottom and top of the movie. So if you have a samller tv like Ken's tv, then the pan and scan movie will look even smaller. However most DVD can do zoom where you can do 4:3 resolution manually.

So yeh, 4:3 sucks actually because you loose some of the things that the directors intended for you to see in its panoramic view.

full screen cos i think widescreen stretches the things out.

This is happen when viewing a 4:3 show (mostly tv show) in a widescreen tv. However nowadays there are no more movies produce in 4:3 resulution. However there are widescreen tv than can be adjust to show a 4:3 show to avoid stretching, so this you will see the black rectangle at the left and right side instead of top and bottom side of the tv.

In Japan and the US, several tv show already shown in HD (even anime like the new Gundam 00) means in 16:9 widescreen resolution, so yeh, 4:3 tv is not suitable anymore to be used

[Duke_Darcy]

Widescreen because it's pretty ace on my 66 inch plasma tv.

[Canuck21]

Original aspect ratio as much as possible for me. I sometime stretch 4:3 content to fit my 16:9 screen when I watch for a long period of time to avoid burn-in since I have a rear-projection CTR, but in general I keep it in its OAR.

[Canuck21]

full screen cos i think widescreen stretches the things out.

Set up your DVD player's display parameter properly according your screen and widescreen content won't be stretched.

[almo89]

Rule of thumb is to watch EVERYTHING in its original aspect ratio no matter if you have a widescreen TV or an old tube TV. I will watch fullscreen for TVB stuff since it was all shot in fullscreen. Movies that are shot in widescree should be watched that way. I use to watch widescreen on my tube with the black bars and it didn't bother e as I knew I'm actually seeing more. Now that I have a new HDTV, it's even better as I can finally take advantage of anamorphic widescreen movies. What happens when I watch TVB stuff now? I get black bars on the side, which is fine with me.