widescreen or standard displays, pan and scan discs will work in the same way as standard 1.37:1 films.
Letterboxed Discs
Since all DVD players can convert a widescreen disc to display properly on a standard video display, there is no technical reason to make a letterboxed disc. However in the early days of DVD, movie studios were selling to a much smaller audience of DVD player owners. Instead of making a new transfer to DVD in widescreen format, to save money they would use an existing transfer that had been made for the laser disc format. Since laser disc had no provision for widescreen films, these transfers were done in letterboxed format, where the black bars at the top and bottom of the image were added to the disc itself during the transfer process.
These letterboxed discs will display properly on a standard display. However, on a widescreen display you will not only see black bars at the top and bottom of the image from the letterboxing process on the disc itself, but the display will add additional black bars at the sides of the image to maintain the correct picture geometry. The final result is a very small picture centered on your screen.
Most widescreen displays have a “zoom” mode that will expand the image in all four directions to fill the screen. However, the picture resolution suffers as many of the available pixels on the disc have been discarded. Fortunately as the market for DVDs have grown these types of discs are now rarely seen.
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