letterbox widescreen. whats the use?

[jeex]

i can understand why home authors might need to create letterbox wide screen movies.. maybe they were capturing from a w/s laserdisc and cant make an anamorphic widescreen dvdr..

but why would big movie studio's make letterbox widescreen movies?

there really is no point to it.. an anamorphic widescreen movie would look the same as a letterbox widescreen movie on a 4:3TV, but would look better on a 16:9 TV.. not to mention that you have to use video data for the black bars at the top at bottom in a letterbox version.. so an a letterbox widescreen would actually look worse than its anamorphic widescreen counterpart.

maybe i'm missing something here.. is making an anamorphic widescreen dvd really much more costlier for the movie studios? i still notice that some movie studios are releasing letterbox widescreen versions of their movies recently..

[guns1inger]

When the cost of producing dual layer disks was (much) higher, matted latterbox was easier to compress down for single layer output. Anamophic widescreen requires around 30% more data. I don't know if it costs substantially more to get an anamorphic transfer to begin with.

Nowadays, the only excuse would be laziness, or because they are re-releasing old transfers.