You are cheated with a letterbox movie on a 4:3 TV since almost all 4:3 TVs are low resolution, and as such letterbox movies lose a lot of detail. I understand the attraction of pan and scan. It is a trade-off between what is lost to the crop and what is lost to the poor resolution. It’s not always true that one is right. Some “full frame” DVDs are not pan and scan, however, they are the same as the letterbox with more stuff at the top and bottom — stuff that’s not vital to the shot, but not necessarily detrimental either.

What I always thought would have made sense would have been for the DVD format to support pan/crop done by the DVD player. When playing on a 4:3 TV in pan mode, the stream would include information on what vertical position to start the frame. This would not have been very hard for DVD players to introduce. The editor who makes the pan version would just record that stream, and the DVD player would have cropped out an appropriately moving 4:3 box from the widescreen image.

This would have allowed there to be just one DVD, instead of having to release both a widescreen and a pan/scan. It would also be easy with today’s player to allow zoom and crop, so that you could zoom in a bit if the user enabled it — since most 4:3 TVs don’t present the full 480 lines sharply you could do this a little bit.

Were DVD players not so locked down, this sort of functionality might well have been put into them, saving the producers, the video stores and the customer money and hassle. Not as much point now that we’re making the transition to HDTV on DVD, though it could still apply to the many movies that are made in wider than 16 by 9.

After home video became a big part of the movie market, movie directors started shooting for it, in particular filming for the open matte style where the normally invisible top and bottom of the shot are revealed, or composing important elements into a 4:3 frame.

I expect as HDTV becomes standardized directors will be told to definitely compose for that aspect ratio, even if they plan to project at 2.35:1 in the cinema. I expect however that more than 1.85:1 will become uncommon.