whazoo commented:
> Anamorphic lenses squeezed the picture, but in a non-linear manner. The reason for this was that you would not lose detail in the middle, only toward the edges, where the eye is not a fussy. <
Whoa! This is completely and totally incorrect. Anamorphic image compression, whether performed by an optical lens or by digital means, is always (and always has been) a linear process. It's ridiculous to state otherwise.
Proof: take any anamorphic source material (like, say, an AVIA test disc, for instance), display the full image frame at 4x3 to fill a screen on a front projector (vertical ovals), then squeeze the image down (vertically only) to a 16x9 ratio, so the circles are circular, and the squares are square. Examine the resultant image on the horizontal axis. Are all the boxes of uniform width? Or do they vary in width, being wider (more detail) in the middle, and narrower on the sides? (Clue: it's uniform horizontally).
Anamorphic compensation for DVDs ONLY adjusts the vertical axis, by discarding 1 out of every 4 scan lines when displayed on conventional 4x3 monitors (or by electronic compression in more advanced sets like the Sonys). It does nothing to the horizontal axis.
I can't believe nobody caught this obvious faux pax.
- Tim
P.S. This is not to say that there aren't displays available that WILL do non-linear expansion of 4x3 material to fill 16x9 displays, to achieve the effect whazoo described, and minimize apparent distortion.