I just bought an Insignia Blu-Ray player. The wireless Netflix is great. Regular DVD's play full screen 16/9 and the quality is out of this world. Blu-ray discs ? Bah ! Not as good as I expected. I also hate losing the top and bottom of the screen. Are all discs made in wide screen ?? What a rip off.
I guess you don't get out to the movies much, since the aspect ratio is the same in a movie theater as it is in Widescreen Blu-ray. You aren't "losing" the top and bottom parts of the screen. The image is staying faithful to the aspect ratio for theater viewing. Maybe your TV isn't up to par for playing Blu-ray. Upscaled DVD pales in comparison to Blu-ray if you have the right equipment. But then again, that's each of our respective opinions and that's what makes the world interesting.
I don't need to have the full side to side picture with the top and bottom cut off. I just want a full screen 16x9 screen. My TV is wide enough. I'm not in the movies .. I'm in my living room. Also it take many minutes just to load the lousey Blu-Ray discs. I'm going back to DVD. You can keep this format.
You seem to be extremely confused about the nature of widescreen aspect ratio. If you subscribe to an enthusiast forum like this you should easily be able to find answers to this situation, but let me give you the breakdown. There are many different aspect ratios of widescreen, and these are chosen by the director for a specific movie so that he may "show you" a specific window on content he wants you to see. Just to give you a concept of this, if you didn't already know, full screen 4:3 aspect ratio is simple, it is 1.33:1 aspect ratio, period. Widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio is 1.85:1, but the problem is, that is not often the preferred format by a director for his movie, just a few of the COMMON widescreen aspects are 1.66:1, 1.78:1, 1.85:1, 1.95:1, 1.35:1, 1.4:1 then there are several less common aspect ratios that have been used at times for more unique movies, such as 1.2:1 for "The Sound of Music" and 1.55:1 for "The King And I." When you are in a theater, the screen adjusts its matting by scrolling the curtains on the top and bottom of the screen to adjust the screen ratio accordingly, go to a movie early and watch this automatically happen before the movie starts. The only way that your tv can do this is by matting your screen with black bars to "reshape" your television to the proper aspect ratio. So as you can see, your problem is not that blu ray is "cutting off the top and bottom" of your content, but that your screen is not the same shape as the director chose for his content. Widescreen dvd's are matted in the same way and use the exact same aspect ratio if your player is setup properly. You must have your dvd player aspect ratio set to 16:9 output or tv ratio in the player menu so that it knows you are outputting to a 16:9 set. What it sounds like you are doing is watching 4:3 / 1.33:1 movies on a 16:9 screen with your dvd player menu set to 4:3, while this may look fine to you what it is doing is stretching a nearly square format movie 33% wider to fill your screen. This causes two distinct problems, one is distortion, the other is the fact that you are not seeing the whole movie, in fact it is now that the sides are cut off because to create that 4:3 dvd format, they cut from 30-50% off the sides of the original that the director intended for you to see. So as you can see blu ray has not changed the aspect ratio at all, except to enforce you to purchase the proper aspect ratio that the movie was filmed in so that nothing is cut from what the director intended. In fact if you were buying the proper ratio of dvd in the first place you would know this. And in fact directors are beginning to enforce thier movies to be produced in only the original aspect ratios, so in the near future, you may no longer have the option of a "butchered" 4:3 format dvd. Coldwash www.billyroth.com
Im sorry this part "1.35:1, 1.4:1 then there are several less common aspect ratios that have been used at times for more unique movies, such as 1.2:1 for "The Sound of Music" and 1.55:1" Should have been... 2.35:1,2.4:1,2.2:1,2.55:1...
I believe that the movie Ben-Hur with Charlton Heston was 2.65 : 1 the widest I have ever seen (actually 2.94 : 1)( done in camera 65, the precursor to Panavision 70 mm ) http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sour...o30_59kECAS3FIYlQ&sig2=cSiEDNdxk3L5D69JaUkXpA
And Lawrence of Arabia .. that's fantastic.. but MUST be seen at a proper big old cinema to even start to appreciate it.
