Trying to watch BBC content on Netflix - 2.39:1 aspect ratio

[Sylvia Else]

Why on Earth would someone make a TV program with a 2.39 to 1 aspect
ratio? It means that on a conventional 16:9 screen, it's using a shade
under three-quarters of the screen, leaving the rest black.

For some reason, this does something to my eyes, and I cannot watch it.

Some producer fancies himself as a maker of wide-screen movies. Well, he
needs a good dose of reality.

FWIW it's worth this was the BBC production "Collateral". I can't tell
you whether it's any good.

Sylvia.

[Peter Jason]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2022 22:25:10 +1000, Sylvia Else <syl...@email.invalid>
wrote:

Has your TV remote an ''expand'' function to fill the screen at the
expense of a little distortion? Mine has.

[Sylvia Else]

Doesn't appear so.

Sylvia.

[Computer Nerd Kev]

Sylvia Else <syl...@email.invalid> wrote:
> Why on Earth would someone make a TV program with a 2.39 to 1 aspect
> ratio? It means that on a conventional 16:9 screen, it's using a shade
> under three-quarters of the screen, leaving the rest black.

An interesting question. 2.39:1 is an anamorphic format (eg.
CinemaScope), which has apparantly become more accessible for lower
budget productions since modern digital movie cameras have higher
light sensitivity than film and therefore don't have the high
lighting requirements that anamorphic lenses demand with film.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_format

The lens characteristics apply a few optical effects to the
final image which are now associated with a particular cinematic
look, and that's what these TV directors apparantly tend to aspire
to:
https://neiloseman.com/the-rise-of-anamorphic-lenses-in-tv/

That notes the approach of filming in anamorphic format, but then
cropping the final film to 16:9, just for the sake of the
cenematic-style lens characteristics.

The show you watched apparantly took this further and decided to
use the original 2.39:1 aspect ratio that they shot with, for TV.
Which indeed seems like a silly waste of everyone's screen area,
but actually it turns out that anamorphic TVs were introduced in
2010 as a high-end option for movie enthusiasts. They're known as
21:9, so that it sounds bigger than 16:9, presumably:
https://www.eoshd.com/news/philips-release-2-39-1-anamorphic-tv-with-2560x1080p-resolution/

But based on this Wikipedia page, that fad seems to have only
lasted a few years and all the major manufacturers have ditched
their anamorphic TV lines now:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21:9_aspect_ratio#Flat_panel_TV

However the current fad, and this one is completely beyond my
understanding, is apparantly anamorphic smartphone screens, with
many models released over the last couple of years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21:9_aspect_ratio#Smartphones

So maybe enough people are watching stuff on their smartphones now
that it convinced that director to keep the anamorphic format
instead of chopping the image into something sensible? In any case,
there's an interesting background to all this.

> For some reason, this does something to my eyes, and I cannot watch it.

SBS broadcasts some movies in their original aspect ratio, or at
least something 'narrower' than 16:9. I noticed it recently with
this Chinese film on SBS World Movies, which IMDB says was 2.35:1:.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11448076/technical

I don't have any particular trouble with it except by things just
being smaller. I don't think the effect is worth the sacrifice of
screen area though (at least for that movie, and most others), but
it may be better than important things getting cropped out if
nobody's willing to do a pan-and-scan type conversion.

> FWIW it's worth this was the BBC production "Collateral". I can't tell
> you whether it's any good.

I mainly stick to the detective shows that do one crime per
episode. These ones that go on and on for ages, exploring far more
sub-stories and characters than I can remember between episode
viewings, then have some new bit of evidence pop up at the end,
rendering 90% of the prior content irrelevent anyway, well they're
not my sort of thing. But unfortunately they seem to be the current
trend (possibly due to streaming services - I still watch this
stuff on broadcast TV myself so I can't watch all the episodes in a
row, not that I'd want to anyway).

--
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[Trevor Wilson]

**What is the brand and model of your TV set?


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[Peter Jason]

On Thu, 15 Sep 2022 15:05:43 +1000, Sylvia Else <syl...@email.invalid>

My TV is a 2006 Sony, quite old. Perhaps yours has the function, but
difficult to access?

[Yosemite Sam]

my TV has that function sans distortion. you just lose some of the
content on each side as you zoom to fill the screen. However, I don't
fill the screen completely. I leave a bit of black at top and bottom to
minimize to some extent the loss of content from the sides.

--
https://tinyurl.com/Yosemite-Sam

FUCK PUTIN!!

[Peter Jason]

On Mon, 26 Sep 2022 17:40:14 +1000, Yosemite Sam <fe...@goaway.com>
wrote:

Actually mine is the same with a "wide", "normal" function.