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16x9 vs. 4x3 letterbox on 4x3 sets The pictures below were grabbed from a region free Pioneer DV-505. The capture device was a Truevision Targa 1000 Pro. The S-Video output of the DV-505 was used for all images. The disc used was "THX DVD Test Disc Version 1." The four images clearly show the scaling artifacts introduced by players when converting 16X9 transfers to 4X3. A trained eye can easily see these artifacts on 16X9 films playing on a 4X3 set. My Sony and Zenith players at home look about the same as the Pioneer tested with the THX disc. I'm posting this in response to the public assumption that 16X9 looks better than 4X3, period. Part of that assumption probably comes from the fact that most 16X9 transfers are brand new and many 4X3 transfers are very old. Please keep an open mind when reading this. I'm trying to make two points by supplying you with these frames: 1. Telecine machines and/or video scaling devices (K-Scope, DVEous, DME-3000, etc.) are better at scaling than the $5-$25 chip in a DVD player. I've somewhat illustrated this with the fourth frame below. I used photoshop to do a bicubic scale on the 16X9 image. The results are clear. 2. 16X9 DVD's use bits on scan lines that you will never see on a 4X3 set. Many DVD players use decimation (throwing away lines) or averaging rather than smooth interpolation to convert from 16X9 to 4X3. Because black scan lines take up less data than active picture information, more data will be allocated to each active picture line on a 4x3 letterbox than a 16X9 transfer. As an example: If you have a 16X9 transfer of a film with an aspect ratio of 1.77:1, there will be 480 active lines compressed. At an average bitrate of 5Mbits/sec, the average bitrate per line will be 10.4 Kbits/sec. The same film transferred as a 4X3 letterbox will have about 360 lines of actual picture information giving each active line around 13.8 Kbits/sec. The letterbox does take up some data, but far, far less than active picture information. Everyone is screaming for 16X9 transfers on DVD. As a consumer with several 4X3 sets, I prefer 4X3 letterbox because it just plain looks better on my gear. When I upgrade to 16X9 NTSC, I won't be so happy. But I don't think I ever will. When it comes time to buy a 16X9 set, I'll probably go Hi-Def. Sure the 16X9 NTSC DVDs will look better than the 4X3 DVDs, but I'll put all of them in a pile next to my laserdiscs and start buying Hi-Def content. |
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