Opinions & Insights
Remember the Fullscreen vs. Widescreen Debate?
A Look Back At Those Dreaded Black Bars
by Paul Stacy
With many HD televisions being old enough to find themselves out by the curb on garbage day and cheap enough to be given away with the purchase of a mattress, the newness and coolness of HDTV wore off long ago. Today, it’s not uncommon for a home to boast multiple 4K televisions with most having screens much larger than the standard definition TVs that once sat in their places. It’s the not-so-new normal. We’ve grown accustomed to the crystal clear images that once dazzled us and the wide, rectangular, 16:9 aspect ratios that make our living rooms feel like movie theaters. And while people have always embraced better picture quality — from black and white to color, from VHS to Blu-ray, from SD to HD, from HD to 4K/8K — those pesky aspect ratios caused more drama among family and friends than politics and religion combined.
We really don’t think or hear much about aspect ratios anymore, which makes sense because we got used to the “new” aspect ratio years ago. But, for the sake of review, an aspect ratio describes a screen's proportions in terms of width to height. Standard definition television (which isn’t standard anymore) is 4:3, four units of measure wide to three units of measure high. So, almost square but not quite. HD televisions and many movies are 16:9 (or close) which means they’re 16 units of measure wide to nine units of measure high. They’re much wider than the standard TV screens many of us had growing up. Simple, right?
And yet, visiting Blockbuster on a Friday night with a friend in the dark times before HD could put the best relationship to the test. Even if you were a tech-savvy gadget geek, chances are you knew at least one person who just couldn’t wrap their head around “fullscreen” (4:3) and “widescreen” (16:9) movie formats. They’re likely the same people who still own dozens of fullscreen DVDs that display annoying vertical black bars down either side of the screen, motion sickness-inducing pan and scan or — even worse — stretch the image horizontally to fill the widescreen frame and make everyone look 25 pounds heavier. Of course, before HDTVs became commonplace, those same people would complain about the annoying HORIZONTAL black bars along the tops and bottoms of their movies and might have even preferred to stretch the pictures to fill their standard definition TVs, making the actors look a foot taller.​​​
Looking back, it’s hard to see where the disconnect was. The difference between a square and a rectangle is something most of us have known since kindergarten. Yet, back when we were rooting for Ross and Rachel to get it on, people seemed to think a 16:9 widescreen Hollywood movie should be able to completely fill a 4:3 square(ish) standard definition television screen with, I assume, magic or something. They essentially thought you could hammer a rectangle into a square hole and everything would look just fine. In fact, many thought the black bars at the tops and bottoms of letterboxed or widescreen movies indicated picture loss and that the movies were being “chopped off.” And no matter how many times you’d explain that it was just the opposite — that letterboxing actually enabled the entire picture to be shown while standard format (filling the screen) was actually chopping off the sides of the movie — you’d be met with blank stares.
Thankfully, like Z. Cavaricci jeans , Reebok Pumps, and Heinz Green Ketchup, that’s all in our rearview now. With the exception of the occasional movie presented in an even wider format than 16:9, the dreaded black bars have mostly lost their evil powers. We don’t debate them, explain them, or really notice them anymore. But, of course, nothing truly dies because some people just won’t let it. The black bars are still out there. More annoying and fatter than ever. And they’ll never go away as long as people refuse to turn their %&$@# smart phones sideways when shooting videos.
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More articles by Paul Stacy:
"AI: Will it help us or replace us?"
"Message First for Better Marketing"
