DVDizzy Forum

I care a lot about owning a movie in its original aspect ratio, but seeing as I don't have a widescreen TV (yet), the enhancement isn't actually important. However, when I finally own a widescreen TV, then it'll really matter. Most of my DVDs are enhanced for 16x9 TVs anyway.

Widescreen 16:9 enhanced is important to me, even though I don't have a widescreen television. But the anamorphic versions usually have a higher bit rate, making for richer colors and darker blacks, which makes side-by-side comparison of The Lion King 2 and Mulan's first Limited Issue/Gold Collection grainy versions with their crisper, more vibrant 16:9 enhanced SE's available today.

But then again, I have seen some letterboxed movies that weren't 16:9 enhanced, and they looked really good for it not being anamorphic. It all depends if the movies look better than their non-anamorphic counterparts.

azul017 wrote:Widescreen 16:9 enhanced is important to me, even though I don't have a widescreen television. But the anamorphic versions usually have a higher bit rate, making for richer colors and darker blacks, which makes side-by-side comparison of The Lion King 2 and Mulan's first Limited Issue/Gold Collection grainy versions with their crisper, more vibrant 16:9 enhanced SE's available today.

But then again, I have seen some letterboxed movies that weren't 16:9 enhanced, and they looked really good for it not being anamorphic. It all depends if the movies look better than their non-anamorphic counterparts.

Great point! The transfer's quality is definately more important to me than whether it's anamorphic or not. I always prefer the transfer is anamorphic because of the resolution boost it provides, and becuase of the fact that I have a widescreen TV. But yes, I'd always prefer a terrific 4x3 transfer to a terrible 16x9 version. (However, in most cases that is not going to happen. But it has on occasion. Some of Warner's double sided discs have better fullscreen transfers than their 16x9 enhanced counterparts. Especially the ones that are open matte! Take the Batman movies for example, in some ways the transfers on Batman Returns and Batman Forever are much better on the fullscreen then they are on their grainy widescreen counterparts.)

maybe the widescreen Batmans transfers were made from release prints, while the open matte ones were made from an earlier film element like the internegative or interpositive that have less grain richer purer colors etc. being low contrast orange dye mask material..

Well, I'm a bum and whenever we go on vacation I like watching stuff on our 5" widescreen TV. So I prefer 16X9 enhancement, but if it doesn't have it I'll move on.