CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

CasetheCorvetteman · Joined: 09 Nov 2008 Posts: 6326 Location: Australia

More than 75%

MrBlonde83 · Joined: 16 Mar 2009 Posts: 132 Location: Lansford, PA

Right... The ceiling in the room I have my CRT set up is 8 feet, maybe even 9 feet high... so that is not a problem. The width is like 100 inches. Don't want to raise the screen up anymore because i'm already using the keystone correction on the Marquee 8500 which is on a cart in the middle of the room. Not a permanent set up.

So yeah, I mainly watch 16:9 content. Very few black and white films prior to the cinemascope era which came after the popularity of Television.

CasetheCorvetteman · Joined: 09 Nov 2008 Posts: 6326 Location: Australia

Mine is 2700 high at the low end, 3000 at the high end where the screen is.

andy2000 · Joined: 03 May 2013 Posts: 32

The only thing that bothers me about 16:9 is that aspect ratio switching isn't automatic. Almost every time I go to a restaurant or bar at least some of the TVs are set to the wrong aspect ratio. Why in the world did they think the average consumer would be able to (or should have to) manage aspect ratios manually? Even broadcasters frequently make aspect ratio mistakes which are sometimes impossible to undo at home.

CasetheCorvetteman · Joined: 09 Nov 2008 Posts: 6326 Location: Australia

The Panasonic GAOO i had used to do the job automatically.

UncleWill · Posted: Fri Feb 14, 2014 2:19 pm Post subject:

I have a 4:3 draper screen at home. 115" across. I took it back to our dorm in college with a station wagon. The thing took up the entire length of the car. I couldn't believe how humungous it really was! It is certainly taller than me - the way big screen TVs in the 90s always looked! (granted I was much smaller then..) Now set up at home, the screen just barely misses the floor. Absolute excess in every sense of the word. This does make placing the future center channel somewhat tricky though - top or bottom?

4:3 doesn't bother me at all. Since most of my sources were in the old ratio anyway, it was the logical choice. This might change with my oncoming BluRay upgrade. 4:3 is harder to focus on all at once for me just because of the height. It is just so damn much. Perhaps I am sitting too close? Smile

Jeremy112 · Joined: 28 Sep 2006 Posts: 2649 Location: Fond du Lac, WI

I think the main reason 16:9 is out (and why any widescreen is out) at all, is simply because we humans see things in a wider angle, not taller. Your peripheral vision doesn't go up and down nearly as much as it does left to right. I find 16:9 to be less stressful on the eyes, the black bars don't bother me, since to me the black bars are nothing, since I know that if I'm watching 4:3 material, it should have black bars on each side of a widescreen. The height issue was never an issue for me. Wider always seemed to make me "feel" like I was immersed in the video. As for viewing stuff on the computer more vertically than horizontally, get a widescreen that pivots and voila! You now have a VERY tall monitor.

In reality there are solutions to almost all of these issues for widescreen displays. Your pickiness and taste will decide what you like best.

CasetheCorvetteman · Joined: 09 Nov 2008 Posts: 6326 Location: Australia

Graham Johnson · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 10:06 pm Post subject:

I don't miss it for TV, But I have fond memories of 2002 when I had a 1270 with a HUGE 4:3 screen playing Imax movies.

The height was about 2.5 metres and it looked AWESOME and MASSIVE. Totally immersive. If I ever get a CRT to use again, I will try to replicate this experience.

thewolfman · Joined: 28 Mar 2011 Posts: 1311 Location: Sweden

I saw Full Metal Jacket last week, re-rendered in 16:9, and liked it way better over the original 4:3 one. But enjoy 4:3 as well..as I like to catch up on old movies, westerns mostly, as they happen to be shot in 4:3 mostly so it a win win.

But I get what you are saying, there's a beauty in these old black and white 4:3 movies for sure. I try all the time to make up for those lost moments and just see them. My aim is to see every God damn appearance of Clint Eastwood before I die. (And Stallone!)

ecrabb · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:33 pm Post subject:

ecrabb · Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2014 11:37 pm Post subject:

Weird… So, after I posted, I was curious, looking at some Kubrick films, and FMJ, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut were all shot 1.37, but matted to 1.85 prints… But, only for US theaters! What's weird is that it was presented at 1.66:1 in Europe. Does anybody know why the difference between Europe and US? Do they use a taller AR in Europe so they can print subtitles in the destination country's language and not impinge as much on the "composed" area of the image? What about the UK?

Weird!

SC

thewolfman · Joined: 28 Mar 2011 Posts: 1311 Location: Sweden

VideoGrabber · Joined: 09 Apr 2006 Posts: 933 Location: Michigan

UncleWill · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2014 10:08 pm Post subject:

ecrabb · Posted: Tue Apr 15, 2014 10:33 pm Post subject:

UncleWill · Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2014 3:08 am Post subject:

Okay, I think you get the cookie here. Must have misread this article from years ago. I didn't realize they cropped the film at the top and bottom to achieve the 1.85:1 ratio. Thought it was the other way around.

This review excerpt explains it some more:

Let's begin by addressing the controversy about the movie's widescreen aspect ratio. Full Metal Jacket was composed for and played theatrically at 1.85:1. However, when his films were released on the VHS and laserdisc formats in the early 1990s, Stanley Kubrick instructed that they be presented open-matte, exposing the entire image on the camera negative regardless of his original framing intentions. In some films, this revealed previously hidden production flubs such as the helicopter rotors at the top of the frame early in The Shining. On other films like Dr. Strangelove, the full-frame presentation resulted in aspect ratio variances from shot to shot within scenes, since certain shots had hard mattes in place inside the camera while others didn't. Both of these artifacts would normally be invisible or at least lessened with proper widescreen matting. In almost all of the films, the looser 4:3 framing simply throws off the compositional balance of the entire movie, leaving too much empty headroom at the top of shots and dead space at the bottom.

Kubrick asked for the full-frame presentations because, to be perfectly blunt about it, he was a black bar hater and didn't like seeing letterboxing on his TV screen. He had some eccentric ideas about black bars affecting the viewer's perception of the movie. Unfortunately, the director died before the prevalence of widescreen televisions on the market, and we will never know if he might have eventually changed his opinion (William Friedkin used to be a black bar hater too, but now embraces widescreen on home video). This is especially problematic because it's lead to the common misconception that 4:3 was always the intended Original Aspect Ratio for these films, which is simply not the case. When it came time to release them on DVD, Warner Home Video believed that they were doing the right thing in honoring Kubrick's wishes by retaining the 4:3 framing, even for the "Digitally Remastered" editions released in 2000.

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/24109/full-metal-jacket/

thewolfman · Joined: 28 Mar 2011 Posts: 1311 Location: Sweden

This review got me to see it again.

http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Full-Metal-Jacket-Blu-ray/534/

Btw, I saw the extras first, and learned more about R. Lee Ermey and how he was cast and such. A genius move to cast him for that role, I'm sure you know that many of his lines were never scripted, they just let him loose and filmed him as he came up with these unforgettable one-liners. One after another. Apparently he was a drill sergeant for real also, witch makes it even more interesting seeing it again, well, for me it was anyway.