</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
anamorphic dvd's will automatically display black bars on a 4:3 TV, but not display them on a 16:9. There is no need to change any settings, they just work.
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Anamorphic DVDs will display black bars on 2.35:1 movies, because that ratio is wider than the 1.78:1 ratio of a widescreen television. They should display slight black bars on 1.85:1 material because that is also a bit wider than 1.85:1, but the "overscan" in most TV sets prevents the bars from being visible. Again, anamorphic (in the context of DVDs) is a process to improve the quality of the image on widescreen TVs, not an aspect ratio.
And some older widescreen sets do need to be manually adjusted to display letterboxed or anamorphic widescreen material correctly. Mine is one of them. The TV, not the disc or the DVD player, is what determines how things are displayed.
In all cases the DVD player must be set to the correct type of monitor, although this only has to be done once. If you have a 4:3 TV and your player thinks it is a 16:9 set, anamorphic discs will display in a 4:3 window, but with minimal letterboxing bars and everything in the picture will look "tall and skinny" Conversely if you have a 16:9 set and the player is output is set to 4:3, you'll get a standard letterboxed image and never enjoy the increased picture quality of anamorphic discs.
Finally some newer 4:3 sets have a built-in "anamorphic squeeze" mode that will correctly display an anamorphic disc with the increased resolution by reducing the space between scan lines.
Regards,
Joe