Widescreen - Television

Television

The original screen ratio for television broadcasts was 4:3 (1.33:1). When preparing a film that was originally intended to be displayed in widescreen for television broadcast the material was often edited with the sides truncated, using a technique called pan and scan. Sometimes, in the case of Super35, the full film negative was shown unmasked on TV (i.e., with the hard matte removed), however this causes the 4:3 image to not be what the director intended the audience to see—and sometimes boom mikes, edited out of the shot when the picture is matted, can be visible. Modern widescreen televisions feature a 16:9 (and occasionally 16:10) aspect ratio, allowing them to display a 16:9 widescreen picture without letterboxing (or with a minimal letterbox in the case of 16:10).

In Europe the PAL TV format, with its higher resolution than NTSC format meant the quality issues of letterboxed or matted movies on TV was not as severe. There is also an extension to PAL, called PALplus, which allows specially equipped receivers to receive a PAL picture as true 16:9 with a full 576 lines of vertical resolution, provided the station employs the same system. Standard PAL receivers will receive such a broadcast as a 16:9 image letterboxed to 4:3, with a small amount of color noise in the black bars; this "noise" is actually the additional lines which are hidden inside the color signal. This system has no equivalent in analog NTSC broadcasting.

Despite the existence of PALplus and support for widescreen in the DVB-based digital satellite, terrestrial and cable broadcasts in use across Europe, only Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, Scandinavia and the UK have adopted widescreen on a large scale, with over half of all widescreen channels available by satellite in Europe targeting those areas. The UK, in particular, began moving to widescreen with the advent of digital terrestrial television in the late 1990s, and commercials were required to be delivered to broadcasters in widescreen as of 1 July 2000, "C-Day".

Widescreen televisions are typically used in conjunction with Digital, High-Definition Television (HDTV) receivers, or Standard-Definition (SD) DVD players and other digital television sources. Digital material is provided to widescreen TVs either in high-definition format, which is natively 16:9 (1.78:1), or as an anamorphically-compressed standard-definition picture. Typically, devices decoding Digital Standard-Definition pictures can be programmed to provide anamorphic widescreen formatting, for 16:9 sets, and formatting for 4:3 sets. Pan-and-scan mode can be used on 4:3 if the producers of the material have included the necessary panning data; if this data is absent, letterboxing or centre cut-out is used.

HD DVD and Blu-ray disc players were introduced in 2006. Toshiba ceased production of HD DVD players in early 2008 after key defections from the HD DVD camp damaged the viability of the format. Consumer camcorders are also available in the HD-video format at fairly low prices. These developments will result in more options for viewing widescreen images on television monitors.