As a video consumer today, you have more choices than ever. Tape? Laserdisc? DVD? Cable? And if the choice of media isn't enough, there are movies that come out on video in two formats: widescreen (or letterboxed) and full-screen (modified to fit your TV, or so they usually say.). While we are of the opinion that most widescreen presentations give the superior viewing experience, there are definitely some cases in which this is not true. We hope this page will help you understand the choice being given to you.

Advantages of Letterboxing

• In most cases, the picture accurately reflects the movie as you saw it in the theater.
• In most cases (but not all) you get more of the image as it was filmed. In some cases, watching the movie full screen can cause you to lose important information.
• It looks more like a movie, not a TV show.

Advantages of Full-Screen

• The image fills your entire TV screen, with no black bars on the top or bottom.
• The image is larger, and more detailed, due to the fact that more lines of your TV's resolution are in use.

We have put together galleries of screen captures comparing the full-screen versions of movies with their widescreen counterparts. We will comment on each one. In most cases, we owned the widescreen versions and rented the full-screen versions from a video store. Sometimes, the full-screen version was acquired from TV. (Before you look at these, you may want to read the notes below)

• Empire Strikes Back
• Face/Off
• Godzilla vs Monster Zero
• Jurassic Park
• Kiki's Delivery Service
• Rumble in the Bronx
• Star Trek: First Contact
• Star Wars
• Titanic

• A lot of our screen caps for widescreen film may look "jaggy." This is because we had to blow up the vertically shorter widescreen jpegs to match the full-screen ones. In other words, the somewhat poorer quality of the widescreen screen caps is due to a computer limitation, and not the widescreen format itself.
• The term "aspect ratio" refers to how much difference there is between the horizontal and vertical measurements of a rectangle. In this case that rectangle is an image as seen on a TV screen. An aspect ratio of 2:1 would mean that the image is twice as long as it is wide.
• We use the terms "widescreen" and "letterboxed" to mean the same thing. We know this may not be technically correct. In all cases, we assume that the widescreen version reflects what you would have seen if you saw the movie in the theater. Among the more common aspect ratios that you may see in the theater:
  • 2:35:1, which was called Cinemascope or Panavision. Most movies from the sixties on were shot in this ratio.
  • 2:1, which you will occasionally see some Japanese movies presented in.
  • 1.85:1, which seems to be a new compromise used by more commercial films today. It makes the transition to TV easier.
  • 1.75:1, which Disney uses on their animated films.

  For more on ratios, see Godzilla vs Monster Zero.

• We use the term "full-screen" to refer to the aspect ratio of 1.33:1. This is the aspect ratio of a normal TV.
• Most of the time you get more of the original image when you buy the widescreen tape. But there is a format known as Super-35 that some movies are shot in that is an exception. For a good example of a film shot in Super-35, see Titanic.
• The movies for which we did side-by-side comparisons were chosen pretty much by looking at what we had lying around. If you have any suggestions for movie you would like to see us do as side-by-side comparisons, let us know. It would probably be best if both versions of the film are easily available.