Pan and Scan - Background

Background

For the first several decades of television broadcasting, sets displayed images with a 4:3 aspect ratio in which the width is 1.33 times the height—similar to most theatrical films prior to 1960. This was fine for pre-1953 films such as The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca. Meanwhile, in order to compete with television and lure audiences away from their sets, producers of theatrical motion pictures began to use "widescreen" formats such as Cinemascope and Todd-AO in the early-to-mid 1950s, which enable more panoramic vistas and present other compositional opportunities. Although the aspect ratio was the height of a television screen, these formats might be twice as wide as a TV screen when televised. To present a widescreen movie on such a television requires one of two techniques to accommodate this difference: One is "letterboxing", which preserves the original theatrical aspect ratio, but is not as tall as a standard television screen, leaving black bars at the top and bottom of the screen; the other more common technique is to "pan and scan", filling the full height of the screen, but cropping it horizontally. Pan and scan cuts out as much as half of the image.

In the 1990s (before Blu-ray Disc or HDTV), when so-called "Sixteen-By-Nine" or "Widescreen" televisions offered a wider 16:9 aspect ratio (1.78 times the height instead of 1.33), they allowed films made at 1.66:1 and 1.85:1 to fill most or all of the screen, with only small letterboxing or cropping required. DVD packaging began to use the expression, "16:9 – Enhanced for Widescreen TVs".

However, films shot at aspect ratios of 2.20:1, 2.35:1, 2.39:1, 2.55:1, and especially 2.76:1 (Ben-Hur for example) might still be problematic when displayed on televisions of any type (though connoisseurs of films might dispute this). But when the DVD is "anamorphically enhanced for widescreen", or the film is telecast on a high-definition channel seen on a widescreen TV, the black spaces are smaller, and the effect is still much like watching a film on a theatrical wide screen. Though 16:9 (and occasionally 16:10, mostly for computers and tablets) remain standard as of 2012, wider-screen consumer TVs in 21:9 have been released to the market by multiple brands.