Just when you thought the industry had decided on a single widescreen format, along comes another just to further complicate things. If you find 16:9 isn’t quite wide enough, then get ready because 21:9 is waiting in the wings.
While regular 16:9 widescreen is good enough for telly, most films are shot in a wider format. Stick a Blu-ray on and it’s likely that there’ll still be black bars at the top and bottom of your regular 16:9 TV. Effectively you’re wasting 30 percent of your hard paid for pixels on black stripes.
Many films are shot at a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, which is pretty close to 21:9. Equip yourself with a 21:9 set and all you’ll see is the film filling the frame, with no black bars top and bottom.
TVs
The obvious candidate for super-widescreen is the humble tellybox and Philips got there first with its Cinema 21:9 set. It’s the same height as a regular 42-inch but the extra width stretches it to 56-inch, with a resolution of 2560 x 1080 pixels. While it’s great for watching movies on, when you step back down to regular TV you’ll either have to put up with black bars at the side or a stretched image to fill the rest of the frame.
Mobile phones
TV isn’t the only area going super-wide – it’s also cropping up on phones too. The LG BL40 is the first to sport an elongated 21:9 display. Not only can you see longer subject lines in your inbox on its 4-inch screen but it’ll show movie clips at full size without letter-boxing.
Projectors
Where TV is venturing it’s a safe bet the projector market will follow. The Panasonic AE3000, for example, includes a nifty lens memory feature that allows it to zoom at the touch of a button to fill a 21:9 screen, without you having to fiddle with the controls.
Other gadgets
It’s still early days for 21:9 in the consumer space – just think how long it took for 16:9 to take hold over regular telly. But if it does take off, expect to see it in other areas too. Multi-shot panorama is a popular feature on many digicams and something that you could squeeze quite nicely into a 21:9 frame, so expect to see super-wide capable digital cameras further down the line. Sony’s Vaio P laptop doesn’t quite stretch to 21:9, but its 2.08:1 ratio screen is step in the right direction.
