Question - Black bands on top and bottom of the screen. (16:9 TV)

[manono]

It's the Video"Help" forum, not the Video Enthusiasts forum.

And help often comes in the form of education. People have been so conditioned by decades of panned and scanned movies on network TV that they just don't know any better. They think it's 'normal'. They think it's the way to go. They are taught to hate black bars. Then they get their spanking new widescreen TV and think the black bars are a thing of the past. And then they see them not only above and below the picture, but sometimes on the sides as well. Having their prejudices reenforced by the doubly ignorant doesn't help at all. edDV's pics should lay to rest any notions that doing without the black bars one way or another is proper and acceptable

[guns1inger]

From another thread here
Taken originally from Amazon reviews -

"I bought this DVD as a way to show off my new DVD player to my family. I had seen the movie several times in the theater, and knew its bright colors would be beautiful on my TV screen.

To my horror, I saw that Columbia had seen fit to alter a masterpiece. Yes, the film came complete with those horrific black bars at the top and bottom of my screen, which obscured about half of the picture. I've seen those bars on the "artsy" videos on TV, and I sometimes enjoy them. But this is a classic work of art! You don't try to make it "hip" and "relevant" with modern touches. It would be like adding a moustache to the Mona Lisa.

Until Columbia drops the act and releases "Lawrence of Arabia" without those bars, letting us see all of the picture, stay away."

Aah yes, Amazon. The same people that had a review of Kurasowa's Seven Samurai that complained about how it was nowhere near as good as the original version, The Magnificent Seven, and how it showed that the Japanese shouldn't try to remake westerns.

Definitely the place to go for considered discourse.