scenedance (dot com)

I’ll admit that I had to get a Playstation 3 this holiday season, but not for games. There are a fair amount of movies that I wanted to see on the Blu-ray high definition video format, but there was no way that I was going to pay ~$1000 for a compatible player. I mean, I love The Last Waltz, but not that much. Along came the PS3, which seemed to be a much better value at nearly half the price, with the ability to also play games. I ended up getting 2 units on launch day, a 60gb and a 20gb, and sold one on ebay, keeping the other.

The system performs very well as a Blu-ray player, but one thing has me pretty stumped. I’ve been reading a fair amount of A/V forums (most notably, the AVS forum) and there are multiple questions a day coming from new Blu-ray or HD-DVD owners that are shocked to see “those horrible black bars” on their high definition screens. I assume that HBO and the other premium movie channels that air in HD are partly to blame, as they almost always crop the films so they fit perfectly on most screens (with the aspect ratio 1.85:1). High definition television shows are also for the most part presented in “fullscreen,” but that usually their native aspect ratio.

DVD has been popular for quite a while; one would think that Joe Public would have gotten used to the way widescreen movies are presented by now. At any rate, it looks like the film industry is going to have to ready another round of PR to explain aspect ratios to new high definition film consumers.