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Why do we have wide-screen displays?

Chuck(G)

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Okay, so the answer to the topic obviously is "to watch movies made in wide-screen format", right?

But why are movies made that way? My field of vision is not a mailbox-sized rectangle. In fact, a little simple experimentation seems to indicate that it's roughly circular. That is, I can see the floor and ceiling of this room as well as the walls without shifting my vision.

I can understand Cinemascope--in my youthful days, I spent some time picking up cash as a projectionist in a drive-in theater. I'm familiar with changing lamp carbons, striking and regulating arcs, threading up film, doing changeovers (and marking them), etc. All skills of absolutely no value today.

And I do remember the big heavy Cinemascope anamorphic lenses--and the hilarious results if you forgot to change them. But Cinemascope was a simple way for a theater owner to expand his viewing area by simply adding "wings" to the projection screen. After the wider screen, the only other investment was a set of lenses to "stretch" the image, at a sacrifice in brightness (often, a theater would upgrade their "cans" at the same time they moved to wide-screen).

It wasn't practical to expand the screen in the vertical direction, obviously, as indoors, you're limited by where the floor and ceiling are as well as needing a certain amount of elevation to clear the top of the audience. Outdoors, you'd be looking at an expensive structural engineering nightmare.

But today's home viewing experience isn't limited by this. So why are there no 60-inch wide and high TVs? And why is the broadcast format still the old 16:9 aspect ratio? It seems silly to me.

This topic came up to me as I was tossing out some old Electronic Design magazines and happened to run across an exposition of that special-effects-laden-but-lousy-writing spectacle Prometheus. The talent was expensive, the equipment cost must have been astronomical and you wind up with a 2-star rated (they don't give zero stars) disaster.
 
As a long time pro photographer I know that a roughly 5:3 aspect was what we always strived to achieve to obtain the greatest eye appeal. 5:3 = 15:9 so 16:9 seems to be a slightly further refinement of the 5:3 or 15:9 aspect ratio. I don't know where the 5:3 originally came from or even if it has any real truth behind it, however. But it is and always has been the industry standard.
 
But why are movies made that way? My field of vision is not a mailbox-sized rectangle. In fact, a little simple experimentation seems to indicate that it's roughly circular. That is, I can see the floor and ceiling of this room as well as the walls without shifting my vision.

Human field of vision is a horizontally-elongated oval. (If our eyes were spaced farther apart, it would be more elongated; if we were cyclops, it would be almost a circle.) But since we haven't found a way to make oval TVs cheaply (yet), we make do with rectangles.
 
Human field of vision is a horizontally-elongated oval. (If our eyes were spaced farther apart, it would be more elongated; if we were cyclops, it would be almost a circle.)
Does that make Chuck(G), with his 'roughly circular' field of vision, some form of cyclopsian derivative? :)
 
Human field of vision is a horizontally-elongated oval. (If our eyes were spaced farther apart, it would be more elongated; if we were cyclops, it would be almost a circle.) But since we haven't found a way to make oval TVs cheaply (yet), we make do with rectangles.

Ahem, remember the old port hole TV's? ;)
 
What about the idea of 16:10 displays? I'm noticing them more in higher end screens, and they don't seem so wide as they're slightly taller. Technically CGA's 320x200 was a 16:10 resolution, so where did that idea come from?
 
Human field of vision is a horizontally-elongated oval. (If our eyes were spaced farther apart, it would be more elongated; if we were cyclops, it would be almost a circle.) But since we haven't found a way to make oval TVs cheaply (yet), we make do with rectangles.

Eh, Zenith did back around 1950 . . .
 
Yes, but those scanned in a rectangle just like all CRT broadcast tubes, and were only port-holed due to framing of the picture.

At least one Zenith model had a round CRT back then, just like some o'scopes of the day. IIRC, there were quite a few round CRT's and some tv's had a mask or bezel over the tube to make them look somewhat rectangular. I had a 10" Hallicrafter [1948] that my grandmother gave to me and it had a round CRT (push button tuning also).
 
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I'll say that when I walk into a room with normal 8 ft. or thereabouts ceiling, I'm acutely aware of where both the floor and ceiling are. I can't say that about TeeVee. Similarly, if I watch TV, almost all of my attention is focused in a rougly square area in the center of the screen. If I'm watching an old movie that occupies the center of the screen, it's only a couple of minutes before I've forgotten that it's not wide-screen.

If the object is realism, it fails miserably. The few times I've seen 3D TV, I've had to quit because of a raging headache. Apparently I'm not alone.

All of this reminds me of the 1930s experiments with "realism" in sound. One of the radio manufacturers did a double-blind study using a small live ensemble behind a curtain and electronics using the best available technology of the day. Strangely, there were those who claimed that they couldn't tell the difference. The more startling conclusion was that people preferred listening to bandwidth-limited (6KHz, I think) reproduction than with the best wideband technology back then.

I remember the first time I heard FM radio--I thought it was stunningly real. I could never reach that conclusion again.

Maybe one day we'll have full-surround TV with touch, smell and taste. But wide-screen ain't it.
 
Well, one reason movies aren't as tall as they are wide is of course that there's very little of interest up there.. and I guess the microphones would be diffiult to hide! :)
 
Well, one reason movies aren't as tall as they are wide is of course that there's very little of interest up there.. and I guess the microphones would be diffiult to hide! :)

...not to mention the lighting gear. Yours is the best answer that I've heard justifying the use of wide-screen instead of tall-screen. How many TV sitcoms show the ceiling of a room, much less showing the floor covered with gaffer's tape and spotting marks for the cast?

Oh, by the way, here's the article on the filming of Prometheus.
 
I'll say that when I walk into a room with normal 8 ft. or thereabouts ceiling, I'm acutely aware of where both the floor and ceiling are. I can't say that about TeeVee. Similarly, if I watch TV, almost all of my attention is focused in a rougly square area in the center of the screen. If I'm watching an old movie that occupies the center of the screen, it's only a couple of minutes before I've forgotten that it's not wide-screen.

If the object is realism, it fails miserably. The few times I've seen 3D TV, I've had to quit because of a raging headache. Apparently I'm not alone.

All of this reminds me of the 1930s experiments with "realism" in sound. One of the radio manufacturers did a double-blind study using a small live ensemble behind a curtain and electronics using the best available technology of the day. Strangely, there were those who claimed that they couldn't tell the difference. The more startling conclusion was that people preferred listening to bandwidth-limited (6KHz, I think) reproduction than with the best wideband technology back then.

I remember the first time I heard FM radio--I thought it was stunningly real. I could never reach that conclusion again.

Maybe one day we'll have full-surround TV with touch, smell and taste. But wide-screen ain't it.

The first stereo that I ever heard was from the movie 'This is Cinerama', about 1953 or so, at the Music Hall in downtown Detroit. The 1955 GM Autorama Expo, at the Michigan Stae Fair grounds, had a kiosk display where one could put on a headset and hear a montage of sounds, in stereo, such as a lion roaring, crowd noise, jet aircraft, etc.
 
As a long time pro photographer I know that a roughly 5:3 aspect was what we always strived to achieve to obtain the greatest eye appeal. 5:3 = 15:9 so 16:9 seems to be a slightly further refinement of the 5:3 or 15:9 aspect ratio. I don't know where the 5:3 originally came from or even if it has any real truth behind it, however. But it is and always has been the industry standard.

I like 8"x10" for for the practicality of it's size, however, in roll film I've always liked the 6x6 (2 1/4" x 2 1/4") format. It feels natural and things just seem to "fit". A lot of photographers (think Hasselblad, Mamiya, Rolliflex) have favoured that.

Ya, I've always wanted a computer monitor that was taller than wider. The modern wide ones have an advantage though. Since nobody would use a program full screen anyway (I hope!), one can now have two or three windows side by side. Very handy for viewing pdfs and inputting information into a data base, for example.
 
The first stereo that I ever heard was from the movie 'This is Cinerama', about 1953 or so, at the Music Hall in downtown Detroit. The 1955 GM Autorama Expo, at the Michigan Stae Fair grounds, had a kiosk display where one could put on a headset and hear a montage of sounds, in stereo, such as a lion roaring, crowd noise, jet aircraft, etc.
I got to see "This is Cinerama" during it's initial run in NYC. We were out from California visiting an Uncle. Cinerama is one of the few things I still remember about that trip, I was only 7 or 8 at the time.

Turner Movie Channel recently showed "This is Cinerama", it was fun to watch on TV but not the same as a true cinerama showing.
 
But why are movies made that way?

Originally, makers and audiences expected movies to imitate a stage proscenium. Movies were first exhibited commercially as part of stage variety shows. Though I think the pioneers like Lumiere brothers did use close to square frames.

You'll recall that widescreen formats were developed primarily for "action" spectaculars, where the action really does occur mostly on a horizontal plane. There's not too much vertical action outside porn and the occasional rocket-launch. Earlier low-res, made-for-TV drama was directed to favour close-ups, where the 4:3 ratio could be fully used.

As a projectionist, consider also the economics of film stock. A wider frame gives more frames per foot of stock, at a given resolution. (e.g. Super8 film cribbed a little more horizontal resolution out of the same frame height as standard 8mm 4:3 ratio film). For the industry, filmstock costs were a significant consideration in the days of thousands of prints of physical silver-based film. When I was working in documentaries, even the original shooting stock was strictly rationed.

Later the marketing of home video players, from Beta onwards, was primarily based on the ability to show existing film-based entertainment. With HD video formats, the biggest markets are sports, landscapes, and epic dramas - where most of the action is horizontal.

Probably only a few "roughly cycloptic" individuals would feel more comfortable with a round or square field of view.;)

Rick
 
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