Is there any way to have widescreen versions of TOS?

Lose them how? Do you actually refuse to watch material that doesn't conform to the shape of your TV?

 

Lose them in the sense that the box they're in will get smaller and smaller with time until they're virtually unwatchable.

 

Yeah, I don't get you. The TV you have now is far bigger than the old square one you used to watch stuff on.

 

I don't understand that. As long as the image is maximized vertically (i.e. reaching both the top and bottom of the screen), then it will be large enough to watch regardless of how wide the screen itself is. I mean, come on, the human field of view is only so wide. Beyond a certain width, you're reaching a point of diminishing returns. Especially with so much viewing these days being done on small mobile devices. You really think anybody's gonna carry around a tablet that's six inches high and a yard wide?

What are you even talking about now? There are already two standard theatrical aspect ratios that are wider than that, 1.85:1 and 2.35:1. And they get shown on a 16:9 TV in letterbox form, with bars on top and bottom. Between letterbox and pillarbox, a 16:9 screen can already accommodate any aspect ratio there is, both ones that are narrower than 16:9 and wider than 16:9. As long as at least one axis of the image reaches both edges of the screen, there's no way it can get too tiny to watch.

You're worrying too much about the shape of the screen. Do you have a problem using the same circular dinner plate for both a square sandwich and a wedge-shaped slice of pizza? Do you feel that your meal is somehow less edible if the plate doesn't conform precisely to its shape? As long as you can fit the whole item on the plate, it doesn't matter how much extra space there is off to the sides.

 

This is what I worry about:


The gray is the tv/computer screen itself. The black is the pillarboxing. The tiny blue center is the film image; with the circle in front representing a person. What I worry is that as aspect ratios expand, 4:3 films and shows will eventually become this - pictures the size of say a still photograph within a vast pillarboxed screen.

 

That's nonsense. Why would you expect anyone to do that? Like I said, it's already normal for a 4:3 image to be vertically maximized -- the top and bottom reach all the way to the top and bottom of the screen. And in theatrical widescreen, the left and right sides reach all the way to the left and right sides of the screen. This is already normal. In any aspect ratio, it's routine for the larger axis to reach all the way to the edges of the screen and the black bars to fill in the space on the smaller axis only. In 4:3, the black space is only on the left and right of the screen; in 1.85:1 and 2.39:1, the black space is only on top and bottom. There is no reason whatsoever to have black space on all four sides. You're confusing proportion with absolute size. 4:3 just refers to the relationship between the two dimensions, regardless of what those dimensions are. It can mean a picture that's 8 inches wide and 6 inches high, or it can mean a picture that 20 feet wide and 15 feet high. It's only a measure of shape, not size.

After all, remember, the 4:3 aspect ratio originated in movies. Films were projected in 4:3 on massive movie-theater screens dozens of feet high before there even was television. The reason TV had a 4:3 aspect ratio in the first place was to mimic the ratio of movies, so that old films could be shown on TV. The reason movies then invented widescreen was to compete with television by offering something it couldn't. And TV then followed suit by switching to widescreen itself, and so on.

Like Tosk said, if you're watching an old 4:3 show like Star Trek on a current big-screen HDTV, you're probably already getting a much larger picture than most TV viewers back in the '60s would've had, and you're undoubtedly getting a far clearer and higher-quality picture. (Not to mention a more complete picture, since old TV screens had rounded edges that cut off some of the picture -- which is why modern viewing of old shows sometimes lets you see things you shouldn't in the edges of the frame, like mike booms or the edges of matte paintings.)

 

Same with me. It's a bit annoying having a smaller picture, but at least the tradeoff is I'm getting the whole picture without the corners shaved off by the slightly rounded screen edges. And of course, if we had modern 16:9 TVs, then we'd have the image going all the way to the top and bottom of the screen, because there's no reason it wouldn't in that format.

Ugh, I hate that. To me, the natural default should be whatever displays the correct aspect ratio in the largest possible size that keeps the whole picture onscreen. I don't see any reason to desire anything different.

And you do forget about the black bars very quickly. You mentioned how 4:3 sets like ours show 16:9 programming in letterbox form. Well, I recently watched the new Ghostbusters movie on DVD, and that's in theatrical widescreen, so it was double-letterboxed on my screen... but the IMAX 3D effects were represented on DVD by often having parts of the image (like proton beams and ghosts lunging at the camera) extend into the black bars that would've been there on a 16:9 screen, so that it looked like they were breaking out of the frame. And at first, I had the impression that the frame-breaking images were extending all the way to the top and bottom of my 4:3 screen, but on rewatching for the commentaries, I realized they were only going as far as the top and bottom of the 16:9 frame shape within it. But I had to specifically pay attention to realize that. On first blush, my mind just accepted that it was filling the whole frame, because it's so easy to forget about the bars.

 

I've noticed DVDs of Big Bang Theory (for example) play in their native 16:9 format, but don't automatically fill the screen of my 16:9 TV. To do that, all I have to do is hit the "zoom" button, but I can't imagine why the TV doesn't fit the picture automatically. But ultimately, I don't even bother, because having grown up with TVs from 19" to no more than 24", even a smaller image is already pretty damn big on my 40" TV

 

And, yeah, I really don't understand why people can't stand the black bars.

 

You can fix it by changing the "aspect ratio" on your TV. That button or menu optoin will be labeled differently on different TVs (e.g. some TVs call it "zoom").

Don't listen to all the curmudgeons in this thread who insist that there's only one way to watch Star Trek - you can obviously adapt your own home entertainment system to whatever specs you like. Enjoy the episodes!

 

I just don't see how it improves the beauty of the shot to chop off the top and bottom of the image or stretch it unnaturally wide just to force it to fit the wrong frame shape. That damages its beauty. It's like choosing to listen to a 45 RPM vinyl record on the 33 1/3 RPM setting because that's more "standard." It's still wrong for that particular record.

I mean, most TVs these days have black edges anyway, so it's easy enough to see the black bars as just an extension of the physical frame, a way of adjusting the frame to fit the intended shape of the image.

 

I never said it improved it. I can't stand the stretching for my own personal viewing and always stick to 4:3.

But the OP doesn't have to watch it the same way we do.

 

Well, many people do have HDTV projectors. I don't know how good the quality is, but doesn't that make 'black bars' irrelevant?

It should.

There shouldn't be any reason why 16:9 images have to be zoomed to display properly. Are you sure that 1) the image you're watching really is 16:9, and 2) your TV or DVD player isn't miscalibrated in some way?

Until?

 

I don't get it. How big is that blue part supposed to be? If you take it to be something like an old 27" diagonal screen, about 22x16 inches, that would make for a screen almost 11 feet wide, something like 140-inch diagonal, way bigger than the vast majority of people could accommodate, let alone afford. If that screen is 60-inch diagonal, that blue box is only about 8x7 inches. Why would anyone set up a TV to display that way?

 

Perhaps one day they will release a special edition that will create computer generated images to either side of the original image, making it "widescreen" without losing anything.

But I won't buy it.

 

It's worth to note that, while the series was shot in 4:3, the new special effects made for the remastered version were made in 16:9. So if you watch the remastered version in 4:3 you don't lose anything of the original footage, but you do lose part of the new special effects. Italian television broadcasted the 16:9 version of the remastered TOS and you could see in full the new special effects, but the original footage was cropped. Obviously the 4:3 version is still the best way to watch it, even in the remastered form.

See pictures below as example:

 

Why not a version that's in 4:3 for the live-action footage but changes to 16:9 for just the digital effects? A lot of modern IMAX films do that, switching from theatrical widescreen to a "taller" 16:9 aspect ratio for the IMAX scenes; I mentioned the new Ghostbusters doing that partially with its 3D effects. And there were older films that changed aspect ratio for different portions -- Brainstorm used 70mm film and a wider Panavision aspect ratio for its VR sequences and a more standard 35mm ratio for the rest, and Galaxy Quest used 4:3 for the TV scenes, 1.85:1 for the Earthbound scenes, and 2.35:1 for the space scenes.

It's interesting that the IMAX format is considered bigger, but it's actually a less widescreen ratio, the same 16:9 ratio as modern HDTVs. In effect, it's just as wide, but taller, same as the difference between a standard modern TV image and a letterboxed widescreen movie shown on TV. So the trend toward "wider is better" may be reversing itself. And I like that idea. Widescreen is good for certain kinds of shot, but there are other compositions that work better with more vertical space. I think it's a good thing if filmmakers feel free to use different aspect ratios as needed, even within a single film. Sort of like how not all comic-book panels need to be the same shape.

 

On the size of flat screens we have now, even if aspects went super-wide, the 4:3 part between the barswould still be objectively bigger than what I saw growing up.

 

Since 16:9 is IMAX ratio, and since it makes a good middle ground between 4:3 and 2.39:1, I expect it to remain the standard screen shape. More importantly, mobile phones and tablets tend to use either 16:10 or 4:3 ratios, and a lot of people watch movies on those. As I said, a phone or tablet or laptop with too extreme an aspect ratio just wouldn't be practical to carry, so that puts a constraint on things. If anything, with IMAX screens and tablets, screen aspect ratios seem to be trending back in the other direction. After all, a screen can always display a wider ratio by using letterboxing.