I remember when they made Anamorphic Widescreen DVDs and some projectors and TVs could squeeze the image down getting a higher resolution in the process.

Do any of the 4k and BluRay DVDs come Anamorphic Widescreen anymore or did they stop that and just let the user expand an image with interpolation?

BD is a 16:9 format and a scope movie comes along with the black bars now. If you do the zoom method CIH then you project all those wasted pixels above and below your screen.

Interpolation it is.

Interpolation only happens if you use an anamorphic lens with the projector. There's no interpolation if you do CIH with the Zoom Method. You just project the original 16:9 image and let the letterbox bars spill off the screen onto the wall.

Exactly. The old DVD's were shot with an anamorphic lens that filled a 16x9 format with a 2.35 scope image so the player squeezed the image down to show black bars but the actual image was 16x9 and out of scale. So my question was are there any Anamorphically shot 2.35 bluray/4k movies that fill the 16x9 format or did they abandon that and leave it to interpolation. Not as good as actual image data but with a decent scaler better than a 16x9 shot 2.35 movie with just black bars.

Not exactly. Anamorphic Enhancement is not the same thing as shooting a movie with an anamorphic lens. Two different things with similar names.

The DVD format was introduced at a time when the majority of TVs were still 4:3 in aspect ratio and 16:9 HDTVs were fairly new. "Anamorphic Enhancement" was the process of optimizing movies for display on a 16:9 screen. This allowed the format to work with either 4:3 or 16:9 televisions. In either case, 2.35:1 movies were still encoded with letterbox bars in the video.

No, there is no anamorphic enhancement on either Blu-ray or 4k. These formats are natively 16:9. Movies with aspect ratios wider than 16:9 have letterbox bars encoded into the image.

As mentioned, no interpolation is needed unless you place an anamorphic lens in front of the projector.

Yes there will be an anamorphic lens in front of the projector.

If you have a 4k projector, I would not recommend using an anamorphic lens except for the models explicitly designed for it, such a the Panamorph Paladins. Older lenses may not be able to pass 4k detail.

- no, there are no anamorphic discs. All uhd blu-rays are 16:9 with the CinemaScope black bars as part of the 16:9 encoded image.

- however there are projectors that can take that image, cut off the black bars and re-encode the resulting video in pseudo anamorphic fashion, so that the projector uses all its 4k pixels of brightness to project the image and an anamorphic lens could then stretch the video to full CinemaScope width. If the projector lacks this feature you could add a video processor that does it.

Since this won’t actually enhance the source material, requires a fairly specific feature on the projector side, and the cost of an anamorphic lens , makes this option much less interesting and common than in the dvd days.




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Here is the most recent thread on this topic, probably not the only one if you go back a few pages:

https://www.avsforum.com/forum/117-2...mage-disk.html

It is important to note that the source for many films is actually smaller than the 4k disc resolution, so it is already scaled up once. There may have been a benefit for anamorphic scaling on bluray 17 years ago for the handful of users with a 1080p projector and anamorphic lens, but that was a tiny number compared to the conversion of televisions to 16x9 from 4x3 in DVD days. I think the loss today is more about the DCI resolution being 17x9 and home resolution being 16x9. You can get a 17x9 projector but the discs and streaming sources are all 16x9.

Scaling at 4k can be expensive if your projector cannot handle it, so prepare yourself.