Why Widescreen?

When you by a DVD, should you buy Widescreen or Full Screen? I think everyone knows the answer is, Widescreen! Buy why?
The easiest answer is that in the future, you "will" have a Widescreen (rectangular) TV instead of a square TV. In fact, if you go to any electronic store you will have a hard time even finding a square TV anymore. Anything you see in a theater will be Widescreen and in fact most prime time TV programming is in Widescreen now.
I know a lot of people hate the black bars on the top and bottom of their TV's. But what those bars are doing is ensuring that you see the entire picture, instead of a portion of the picture. Trust me, you get used to it after a while and once you get a Widescreen TV, they will either be very small or gone entirely. Prepare for your Widescreen TV now and get the Widescreen DVD's, it's worth it to have the little black bars.

Here are some examples of what you are missing if you but a Fullscreen DVD instead of Widescreen. Taken from the Fullscreen and Widescreen versions of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The square is what you will see if you buy the Fullscreen version, and the full image is the Widescreen version.


In this first example you can see that Uncle Vernon is looking into Harry's room as Harry pretends to be asleep. But how do you know Harry is pretending to be asleep, if you can't even see his face. You also have no idea that his bird Hedwig is in the room.


Another example showing that you don't even know Harry is in the room at all.


What is the class looking at? If you don't have Widescreen , you don't even know that Hagrid is standing there.


More of the same stuff, you can't even see the Hypogriff that the Computer Animators spent so much time and money to create.

I think by now you get the idea, here is one more good example of what you would be missing.

The people who make the movies Fullscreen choose what you see and what you don't. Maybe they choose something inconsequential, maybe they don't. Either way, as you can see, you are missing close to "half" of the picture. That means if you buy a Fullscreen DVD, you are really paying twice as much as people who buy Widescreen, you only get half of the movie. Unless a movie is really bad I don't think many people like to turn it off half way through, but that is essentially what you are doing if you by Fullscreen DVD's.
Which brings me to my next point. If you buy Fullscreen, you are telling the manufacturers that you want Fullscreen, so they will keep making it. The majority of consumers actually want Widescreen. Most people that purchase Fullscreen do so by accident and then can't take back the DVD because they have already opened it. Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban, Widescreen version, has a sales rank at Amazon.com of 35 on the Top Sellers List. The Fullscreen version is way down at 433 on the list.
Next time you buy a DVD, make sure it's Widescreen. As consumers we can continue to purchase our Widescreen DVD's and hopefully the manufacturing community will quit making Fullscreen all together.
If you want more information and more examples like I have posted above. Check the following links.
Widescreen Advocate
Widescreen.org