Umm... anamorphic? Never heard that term before. Widescreen? Letterbox? Heard of those. Never heard anamorphic, though. Sounds biological, not technological.

This is getting way off topic. I'm going to have to call the topic police. Wait a minute, I am the topic police. Ha. Well all right, then...

'Anamorphic' is a special method of making a DVD that allows owners of widescreen televisions (like HDTV sets) to view a letterboxed movie in its finest resolution. These DVDs usually have labeling on the back of the box indicating this. It will say either "Anamorphic" or "Enhanced for Widescreen TVs" or "Enhanced for 16:9 TVs" in fine print somewhere on the box.

About half of all the DVDs out there are mastered this way. Although sometimes the box is labeled incorrectly, which is why I wanted to ask an owner of the Princess Bride DVD whether or not this was really the case.

An anamorphic movie, although it's enhanced for widescreen TVs, works fine on a regular TV as well. The anamorphic mode only kicks in when you program your DVD player to "16:9" mode- in effect telling the player that you've got a widescreen TV. By default, DVD players are set up for regular 4:3 televisions and will show these movies properly letterboxed.

But normally, a letterboxed movie wastes about 30 percent of the available resolution. An anamorphic movie doesn't waste any space for the black bars, it vertically compresses the image so that it fills all 480 lines, like so:



As you can see, an anamorphic image looks great on a widescreen TV set because it uses all the lines. Anamorphic movies also look fine on regular TV sets because the DVD player will do the right thing and add the black bars for the letterbox mode.

But if they produce the movie as plain letterbox (not anamorphic), then I have to zoom in on the letterboxed picture with my widescreen TV set. Since I'm zooming in on only 60 percent of the lines, the picture looks fuzzy in comparison to the crystal clear quality of the the anamorphic ones.

So. Does anyone know if the Princess Bride DVD is anamorphic or just plain letterboxed?

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Tony Fabris