Noodles_Leone says in this post http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums/index.php?topic=10178.msg146634#msg146634 that almost all tv's will crop a little around the edges, and the only way to ascertain that you are getting all the information from the image provided by the dvd is to watch it on a computer.
(I really don't know anything about technical terms and I'm kind of learning as I go from these boards and Wikipedia, so please excuse my ignorance on these matters, and some of my posts in which I am struggling to find the correct words to say what I'm thinking cuz I don't know much about this stuff, or the technical terms. I only started being aware of all this technical shit within the past couple of years )
Anyway, does anyone have an opinion on the cropping of Rio Bravo, ie. the chopping of the heads? Maybe they should have shot it a bit longer so that the heads wouldn't chopped?
Also, anytime you zoom in on an image, it loses some quality. Cropping automatically zooms the image. So if the long shot was taken in 1.37:1 and now it is cropped to 1.85:1 and looked like a medium shot, won't the image lose some quality? So wouldn't it be better quality if it had actually been shot in widescreen?
At first forget what I wrote about VistaVision and The Searchers in one of the above posts. It is not an anamorphic widescreen process. I have corrected it.1. Basically every 35 mm has an aspect ratio of 1,37:1. And basically for all widescreen images exactly this 35 mm film stock is used. Now and then. So basically the same film stock was used for the most common formats, for 1,37:1, for 1,85:1, for 2,35:1. And we will ignore here all the exceptions which are also mentioned on that website. 2. Before 1953 nearly every film was shot in the 1,37:1 aspect ratio, and for that simply used the complete frame. (But check the part about silent film)3. After widescreen was established in 1953 the 1,37:1 aspect ratio nearly completely vanished. 4. To get a widescreen image basically 2 processes were commonly used:a) Masking for an 1,85:1 (or in Europe partly 1,66:1) image. This is also called Flat Widescreen. Or only Flat.b) Using anamorphic lenses to get an 2,35:1 image.5. Anamorphic means that they use a special lens in the camera, an anamorphic lens which squeezes the image from e.g. 2,35:1 down to half of its size, and then needs a similar lens in the cinema projector which expands it back to 2,35:1.