I think this was a standards decision geared for the lowest common denominator.
Although it would be great for those of us that are scaling an image UP to have started with 720x480 active pixels for any aspect ratio film -- the more resolution the better -- the DOWN scaling necessary for most analog NTSC TVs would be kind of ugly. So much information would be thrown away that the resulting image would look worse than a non-anamorphic recording.
If DVD players did an intelligent interpolation in their downconversion, then it might have looked OK, but the first DVD players just threw the lines away. DVD may not have been successful if three years ago the players had been required to do this kind of processing -- players were already deemed too expensive for the mass-market when they were introduced.
I agree there was no reason why the standard could not have included the option. In this case, they underestimated the speed with which technology would be able to cope with it at reasonable prices.
I think the same argument can be made for HDTV even more emphatically. Six years ago, when I saw the ATSC "standard" was to have 18 allowable formats, my complaint was not that they didn't settle on a single format. My complaint was that they didn't simply define the bitstream to include packets that told the display device what display resolution the image was in -- and let the display process it to best effect. I had no doubt the processing power would exist to handle it. Instead we will be complaining in five years that we have source material with a lousy 2 million pixel maximum.
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Kirk Ellis
G1000 D-ILA, HTPC, Panamorph (soon I hope),
Dish 6000 (HBOHD,SHOHD,CBS,NBC,ABC,WB,FOX,UPN, KCET -- does it get any better ?)
[This message has been edited by dreamer (edited 08-14-2001).]