What does Anamorphic mean on a DVD?
What does it mean when a disk is" Anamorphically Enhanced"?.
Basically this means that the picture is stretched vertically on
the disk. When the disk is played the picture is resized by the
player depending on the shape of your TV set.
For example if a film is in a 1.85:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
format then on a conventional 4:3 format television the player
will squash the picture to the correct size and insert black
bars at the top and bottom of the picture.
Play the same film on a Widescreen TV and the player will keep
the same vertical resolution but stretch it widthways. The image
therefore will maintain the correct aspect ratio but also fill
the whole screen.
The reason disks are encoded this way is to utilise the maximum
resolution of the picture format (PAL, NTSC etc.) without
wasting screen lines on displaying black bars. You quite often
find that the term anamorphic isn't mentioned on the disk box.
If you see "16x9 Enhanced for Widescreen TV", this basically
means the same thing.