Pan and Scan

I was recently at a bookstore looking at DVDs (Why do we go to bookstores to buy DVDs? I don’t care.) I overheard a woman ask a salesman about the difference between widescreen and standard. When he explained, she said “so, this one [standard] will give me a bigger image, right?” The salesman said “yes” and she bought the DVD. I wanted to scream “No! That one will cut off the left and right sides of the screen! Buy widescreen. Yes, you’ll see a slightly smaller image, but you’ll be able to watch the whole movie as the director intended. With standard, also known as ‘pan and scan,’ you’ll only see the 75% that some high school dropout thinks you deserve to see.” There should be warning labels on pan and scan movies, bigger than the ones on cigarettes, explaining that the DVD does not contain the actual film advertised on the case.

With the increasing popularity of widescreen TVs, maybe pan and scan DVDs will eventually cease to exist. Unfortunately, it’s a huge pain to get the aspect ratio right on those TVs. With 4:3 TVs, it was easy to put a movie in and immediately watch it in the proper aspect ratio. On my parents HDTV, every time I want to watch a movie, I have to go through every setting on the TV at least twice to make sure everything looks right. Too often, I’ll lose half of somebody’s face, Mary Kate Olsen will look fat, or John Goodman will look anorexic. We’re going through a period of transition right now, and I can’t wait until this all gets figured out and the TV will know how to show movies correctly again.