Trivial Aspect Ratios
Dear Gary: I would like to urge you to change some of the direction of Widescreen Review. You sell the magazine primarily to consumers, not to retailers. Yet, the contents of the last Issue 29 read as if the magazine were titled “Video Retailer News.” As one of your subscribers, I am not very interested in industry gossip, news releases, retailer roundtables, etc. What I am interested in is technical reviews of products where direct comparisons are made. On a technical point, I have had total information overload from the magazine’s unbelievably microscopic presentations of aspect ratios. This is trivial arithmetic. What I have not seen, and would very much welcome, are articles on the acoustic/structural design of home theatre spaces. I would also like to see usable advice on system integration such as comparative reviews of Crestron/AMX/Lexicon, etc.
Vytenis Babrauskas, Ph.D., Fire Science & Technology, Inc., Issaquah, Washington
Editor Gary Reber Comments:
I think your suggestions are good and we are, in fact, developing a comparative review of system integration products. We have devoted space to industry roundtables to provide our readers with a sense of how different segments of the electronics/ entertainment content industries are market pushing DVD, and to provide insight into the politics of DVD. We are now developing On Screen stories on HDTV issues. We pay attention to aspect ratio measurements because when they are other than what the filmmaker intended and represented on the packaging credits, then the art has been tampered with. Without verification, there is often no way of knowing just whether a title on disc actually conforms to the original intended theatrical display aspect ratio. One cannot always rely on the credited aspect ratio printed on the packaging. Since our inception, we have always supported the filmmakers’ intended theatrical aspect ratio as the proper aspect ratio displayed on the disc. Sometimes our measurements on our Pandora cursor generator show a significant deviation from the original theatrical aspect ratio; other times the deviation is minor. Then too, the measurements might read out as a standard theatrical aspect ratio, but the picture has been cropped otherwise. I do believe we are the only publication that actually provides electronic measurements of aspect ratios and publishes them as a matter of record. Aspect ratio measurements are confirmed in each review and contained in both the LaserDiscography and the DVDiscography. Your letter is the first to be received that has ever registered a complaint about publishing the actual measured aspect ratios.
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