Why did we Abandon 4:3? | Nostalgia Nerd
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- čas přidán 3. 06. 2024
- Check out sponsor AMD Ryzen Pro Processors for laptop PCs ryzen.pro/en/laptop/ ~ Aspect ratios! It's important. The world seemed to shift dramatically from 4:3 to 16:9 aspect, but the question I often ask is why? Why did we all do that? Like a bunch of zombies walking brainlessly towards the goal. It's kinda wrapped up in the swap from CRT screens to flat panel, but it's a little more intricate than that. So, let's investigate.
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⌚Timings⌚
00:00-00:57 Intro
00:57-06:16 Film aspect ratios
06:16-11:34 HDTV
11:34-13:10 PC Monitor Aspect Ratios
13:10-14:21 AMD
14:21-16:08 Conclusion
16:08-16:39 Credits
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I just wish TV shows actually made use of 16:9 instead of pretending to be movies and adding black bars.
I don't mind this but it is being used way too much
more like people use 16:9 resolutions (1366x768, 1600x900, 1920x1080, so on) people should start relying on 16:10 or 21:9
Different cameras record in different ratios though. A lot of digital is just faking it, they're cropping the picture to some size just because. That can be annoying. But if you break down a Christopher Nolan film, the aspect ratio changes constantly as each shot is generally kept the same as the camera it was recorded on. You may not notice it because you're too busy enjoying it. But some directors are going from 4:3 to super wide-screen depending on the shot desired.
21:9 screens exist, the aspect ratio is the director’s choice
@@KevinJDildonik In his Batman films he wanted the action scenes to have a different ratio than the other scenes, it wasn't because some cameras had a different ratios and he didn't care and left it "as his".
At least that's what he said afterwards.
But if it really was because he was lazy and/or didn't choose the camera, he could still have cropped all the 16/9 images so they all looked the same, I don't believe the aspect ratio changes just because they used a different camera and were stuck with random ratios along the movie.
"Almost everybody has 16:9 display? Well, we are going to put out this cheap Amazon Prime show at 21:9 so black bars will make it more cinematic."
Yeah exactly. It's bogus
And if you actually have a 21:9 display, there are black bars at the top and bottom too. The entire image will be surrounded by a big ol' bezel of black bars.
Disney+ does this, I think Amazon Prime does as well.
@@austinbaccus Not for me, but it was weird that in 1 episode of fallout I had an entire frame of black bars, top, bottom and sides, just in one episode, idk why.
@@Sparktan24 Because it looks a lot more high budget as we're conditioned to see 24/5 fps and 21:9 images as cinematic, and 30-60 at 16:9 a soap opera TV.
@@austinbaccus When this happens I change the CSS code of the page to scale the video
It's amazes me to think that (almost) an entire industry and multiple corporations were able to get together and agree on any kind of standard.
never again probably lmao
We live in a capitalist society, so not really. Unstandardized crap causes wastage of precious precious money while dealing with it.
Globalization.
@@Ikxi SATA, NVME, USB (A and C), HDMI...
@@matheuslorens Well at least HDMI of the bunch has become shite cause HDMI 2.1 doesn't need to have everything of the spec to be 2.1
So it becomes really misleading
You could have also listed RAM, PCIE, Displayport, USB B (dunno why you only specified A and C)
fair play for getting sponsorship from one of the most valuable firms on the planet
The 16:9 transition always makes me think about the first X-Men movie. It's like the movie takes place in a universe where 4:3 never existed and it prominently presented 16:9 TV sets. Even the most rundown bar had a small 16:9 CRT TV.
That is because 16:9 tvs and monitors existed at the time but they weren't the standard until a few years later
@@Brushedmetal360?
@@Brushedmetal3602010, right?
First X-Men movie was released in 2000. 😑
@@damianlee5438 What I meant to say is that widescreen didn't become the standard for TV shows and video games until 2010.
As a videographer, over the past couple years I’ve been shooting video in open gate 4:3 aspect ratio because of social media. This allows the footage to be cropped vertically or horizontally in postproduction. It was strange for me at first but has quickly become my default shooting mode. Specifically 5.8K 4:3 on Panasonic Micro four thirds mirrorless cameras. The extra resolution allows for both cropping and zooming in the frame without a noticeable drop in image quality.
4:3 is likewise a useful aspect for digital illustration because it thumbnails very well. Wide ratios aren't a good match for most portrait or figure images and lead to a lot of compositions that are half blank space.
The noticeable drop in image quality came from using a m4/3 camera in the first place.
Optically, your lenses are projecting a round image. The rectangular form factor which captures the most of that round image is a square (1:1 aspect ratio). 4:3 is the major standard which is closest to that (5:4 is slightly closer, but I haven't seen that since the 1990s). Sticking a 16:9 sensor behind the same image circle doesn't change the maximum angle of view you're capturing, so (for the same pixel width) is objectively worse than 4:3. You can take the 4:3 sensor, crop it to match the dimensions of the 16:9 sensor, and get the same image.
This isn't a factor when viewing an image (unless you're viewing using a projector). So the ideal aspect ratio for image capture is different than for viewing.
@@C.I... I agree full frame will always produce a better image quality than m43 given the same exposure conditions. However, the latest generation of m43 sensors have come a long way within the past 5 years. Dynamic range has increased noticeably due to the employment of dual-gain output technology and resolution has increased to 25MP. For my general videography purposes, these improvements are sufficient. The advantages for me being double the depth of field at a given f-stop and significantly smaller/lighter lenses, especially in the telephoto to super-telephoto range.
@@solandri69 When the image is circular a 16:9 sensor will allow a slightly larger horizontal fov compared to 4:3.
5:47 bro just casually typing up death threats to his wife for a tutorial video..
You know, it may be just an attempt at humour, but yeah, it's almost certainly a really early Incel raging against the chads and beckys. A pioneer in modern hate politics!
@jamesrowden303 ahaha. I have never heard of a Becky like that. So is that the female version of a Chad?
@@TheMightyKinkle yep! Very disturbing.
I kind of figured it had something to do with manufacturing CRT TVs. The curvature of the glass would be much easier to manufacture for a more square-proportioned surface. Then as we moved to LCD and LED screens, that limitation no longer applied.
Curvature allowed for less distortion to the beam. Hitting a flat surface at a corner at that angle would elongate the beam. The curve allowed closer to perpendicular bean angle.
There were plenty of 16:9 CRT's manufactured before and during the transition to flat screens.
@@BasementBrothers No idea how many ViewSonic E70 17″ CRTs I sold! Tons!
The transition happened fast (surprisingly so), but those early few years when everyone was transitioning were pretty rough. Going over people's houses and watching a squashed 4:3 image stretched to fit the 16:9 display was something that still makes me shudder, and then you'd try to fix it for them and get screamed at because "those black bars are so UGLY!". Then there were certain broadcasters who just stretched the image by default. Fun times!
"those black bars are so UGLY!" "And a stretched-out picture _isn't?!?"_
Indeed, the stretched picture feels almost physically painful to me. Personally I prefer the black bars, or that blurred sidebar thing many creators do to fill the black bars when showing a 4:3 clip in a widescreen program.
(Though I also like the frames some of the retro channels -- e.g., Nostalgia Nerd -- use in place of black bars, too. 😎)
@@AaronOfMpls I agree. I went nuts trying to figure out how to display 4:3 content on 16:9 monitors. it turned out that some TVs would only do it if you used the antenna in.
Not everybody was amused: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt_Tower#Incident
Incompetent people hurt my soul
It also didn't help that this period coincided with projection TVs for anyone that wanted to build a home cinema.The worst combo was watching a shakey VCR tape stretched over a dim display.
I wish there was the same amount of availability of 16:10 as 16:9 screens. The extra height is top tier for coders.
Portrait + 4k ❤
Love16/10 in my laptop
The poor availability is due to the fact that 16 : 9 panel sheet is the most common and cheapest to manufacture at the moment :-)
Do yourself a favour and set up a second monitor in vertical orientation. Best of both worlds.
Just buy a good Dell 16:10 monitor. Yes, not super cheap, but I have a grant :) And do not go for super high native resolution, 2560x1600 is perfect in 30 inch screen.
so glad 16:10 is finally coming back for monitors/laptop screens.
I distinctly remember my stepsister having an absolute MELTDOWN temper tantrum in like 2003 or 2004 over this at christmas. I got a VHS copy of the first Lord of the Rings. It was 4:3. Because we still had a (relatively nice but like 26 inch) JVC CRT television.
She made a comment about how she prefers the widescreen versions because "you're missing out on some of the movie" and my family just made the comment of "yeah, but all you're losing out on is... trees and stuff. And in 4:3 the image fills the whole TV" And it somehow devolved into her crying, yelling, and running off to her room.
I don't know why but that's a core memory of mine, lol.
I do wish I still had my ultra high end 21 inch viewsonic ultraflat CRT monitor. I remember getting that for xmas in like 2005 and my dad made me go on a scavenger hunt to find it. It weighed like 50 pounds. It would be such a perfect retro gaming monitor nowadays, it could do 1600x1200 and I remember it still looked amazing, but a $700 widescreen 23 inch benQ LCD that probably looked worse wound up replacing it. I genuinely wish I still had that monitor for a retro PC and console setup.
Your sister was right dammit! 😅
@@datsneakysnek Yes, but having a temper tantrum? Pan and Scan isn't that bad. "But you're not getting the experience the filmmaker wants" yeah but the filmmaker wants us to watch it on a 1000 inch projected movie screen in the darkness with surround sound, that just ain't attainable at home on a VHS player.
I feel for your sister, arguing against a family of people who think that you're "just losing on trees and stuff". Ugh.
I like my 1280x1024 monitor - subtitles are positioned perfectly below 16:9 content.
I had a 1280x960 CRT, it was annoying that everything tried to send either 1280x720 or 1280x1024 to it, both looked wrong.
@@massivepileup I have a 2048x1536 CRT. I always have to zoom in HD content. The most awesome thing ever was the Star Trek Next Generation Bluray. That played at near native resolution and aspect ratio. Can highly recommend for High Def 4:3 content.
THE CURSED 5:4 SXGA REARS IT'S HEAD AGAIN! 🪿
I kept hold of my 19 inch 1280x1024 ex-office dell monitor for years. I eventually gave it to a co-worker so she could use it to work from home on our tiny 11 inch screen laptops.
unfortunate when subtitles get burnt into the video/film.
It's interesting how long ago some these standards were proposed. I remember watching the director's commentary for Back to the Future and at one point Zemeckis goes into why the decision was made to present it in 16:9 ratio. It was originally shot in 4:3 as was standard of the time but was specifically cropped to that ratio because he figured most people who would ever watch the movie would watch it on TV long after the theatrical release, and the specs for future HDTVs had just been submitted so it seemed natural to choose that format.
We may not have hoverboards but at least the 16:9 aspect ratio came true.
There is something that doesn't sound quite right about this. Movies were usually cropped into 4:3 for TV showings, not filmed originally in 4:3. The film was presented in 1.85:1 in the theaters originally. I'm guessing he was talking about possible video releases or a specific showing on TV. No way they discussed filming a huge Hollywood production in 4:3.
@@cactusjackNV I think so too, sounds similar to other directors on deciding which crop is better for the home release.
Stanley Kubrick was notorious for filming his post-2001 films in 4:3 and then cropping them for the theater. The 4:3 versions for television got extra content, not less.
@@cactusjackNVopen matte has entered the chat
5:41 Who the hell was he even sending that memo out to?🤣
Also in the early days of DVD before widescreen TV's became popular. There were many non anamorphic DVDs. Those that contained a widescreen presentation but played back in a 4:3 aspect ratio window with black bars on all 4 sides of the movie instead of playing the picture in a 16:9 aspect on a widescreen TV. You could use the zoom option on the player or TV but that would only make the video look worse.
I’ve still got one of those…I believe it’s the original Rocky movie. Black all way round.
@@davidrumming4734 I still have a few old non 16:9 non anamorphic widescreen DVDs in my collection. Off hand I can remember. 2010 The Year We Make Contact, Shokey and the Bandit III and the 4 RoboCop: Prime Directives TV movies.
it just shows the abysmal postproduction skills of the "professionals". Every school kid would understand that encoding black bars is utterly pointless.
But we also got such highlights as interlaced videos, where the two half frames would not even fit together, so it would always produces lines or a mushy picture by a deinterlace filter.
And of course non-rectangular pixels, which would make the people look like coneheads if wasn't caught during playback.
Recently smartphones have become LOOOONGER again. As if I missed the black bars in landscape.
sony makes 21:9 phones
@@Splarkszter and they're awesome!!!
i love ultrawide.
Probably because pockets are long, and they are trying to get as much screen as physically possible to fit in your pocket.
long phones are great and for the better. i hate the wide phones with bezels. longer screens give more screen area without making the phone any wider. also longer screens are better for phone use i have always felt that the 16:9 iphones were always too short
Longer phones to me are dumb. I only use 1 hand to dial and text and I hate landscape mode for it.
I can remember working as an usher at a cineplex and changing the borders of the movie screen and changing the lens to play movies we called “Scope”. By the time the 90’s rolled around, I don’t think I ever had to do it.
Playing scope movies was annoying. Trailers were filmed normally so I had to sit with the projector and as soon as the trailers were over, you changed the lens with a lever.
During popular movies, there was always one person on weekend showings that would complain the 3-4 trailers weren’t fitting the “scoped” silver screen and quickly go complain so the manager would stand outside the doorway to catch the Karens walking up the aisle to go “speak with the management “. As soon as the trailers were over, they’d hear me rotating the lens with some light bleed through and everything was fine. During the week, we’d just leave it in scope and tell patrons that the trailers were going to be blurry and oversized.
Damn dude, blurry trailers. That's cold man
Calling people Karen because you don't want to do your job. Geesh...sexist...racist and lazy.
My local cinema often gets the borders wrong, and projects the sides of the movie onto the black curtains instead of withdrawing the curtains to fit. It's the biggest screen in the state too, you'd think they'd have some pride and always check it before each movie.
Seriously, people complain that trailers and ads don't fit the screen properly? You must be from USA. 🙂 But this actually still happens even in modern cinemas, I don't know if they are still changing lenses or why is that. Interesting was also when I saw 70 mm oppenheimer in IMAX, they had different projector for trailers, it was much smaller than screen and when they were playing analog movie, there were subbtitles projected with second projector, very interesting.
Wow, dude. Why not just use that silver tape to cause the lenses to swap out when you needed them to? It's the same silver tape used to bring up and lower the house lights. (just taped in a different spot).
I don't care much about aspect ratio, as long as it's correctly displayed. I finally had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the shortscreen era by, of all things, remastered TV shows. A 4:3 original image was padded out to 16:9 by adding pillarboxing, black bars on each side, to the source. Then my 4:3 monitor letterboxes it, adding black bars to top and bottom in order to fit the whole pillarboxed picture. With the end result of me having a huge black frame all around the shrunk picture in the middle. I hated it so much, I felt forced to replace one of my monitors with a shortscreen 16:9 one.
Glad to see a fellow 4:3 evangelist.
that's why a lot of TVs had zoom 1 and zoom 2; they allowed you to zoom into letterboxed cinema and widescreen in a pillared SD cable signal. There was also the really awkward experiment with panoramic stretching, where it would stretch more the further to the side to fill a wide screen 🤮
All DVD players since the 90s have had the technology to flag the DVD streams and correctly display them as 16:9 or 4:3 content depending on the TV, so 16:9 material would automatically have bars placed appropriately at the top and bottom for 4:3 TVs, and 4:3 material would have bars at the side for wide screen TVs. Or if you were a weirdo you could just tell the player to ignore it and just stretch whichever way filled the screen.
I don't know why streamers seem to have abandoned this approach - I imagine they assume people with 4:3 TVs is just a vanishingly small demo.
@@portsmouthonscreen HD 4:3 content on Blu-ray inherently has baked-in pillarboxing (e.g., 1440 x 1080 picture content pillarboxed to 1920 x 1080). If you watch it on a 4:3 TV there will inherently be empty space across the top and bottom (letterboxing), so the combined result is windowboxing (black border around the entire picture content). It can be fixed only if you have a zoom function or you rip the Blu-ray and re-encode it, cropping off the pillarboxing in the process.
DVD is more versatile than Blu-ray with regard to aspect ratios, because it supports both 4:3 and 16:9 display aspect ratios (DAR), whereas Blu-ray only supports a 16:9 DAR (for HD content). Technically it does also support DVD-spec video, which can have a 4:3 or 16:9 DAR, but putting SD content onto a Blu-ray defeats the purpose of Blu-ray, and it's usually only done with bonus content, not the feature content.
Heah exactly... except I ripped the video again cropping the black bars. It took so much time but satisfied my OCD mind. 😂
I worked in the PC industry during both the transition to the 16:10 format and the 16:9 format. During the first transition, we got countless complaints about having cut a chunk of the screen off by the glass half empty crowd. The shift to 16:9, was much more well accepted since it seemed more “modern” by that time, though the user experience was a bit degraded for office use. As mentioned, the driver was cost: 16:10 displays were significantly more expensive due to the volume differences.
Thanks for clearing that up.
Now head to the mystery why PC users had the 5:4 ratio stopgap nobody wanted in the mid 2000.
5:4 was extremely useful for dedicated word-processing setups and in multi-monitor systems used for non-video work. I used to have a 16:9 monitor with two 5:4 monitors at the sides, and it worked really well. Now I have a 32-inch 16:9 and two 24 inch 16:10 monitors, and that works well for more modern content.
@@FireAngelOfLondon yep 5:4 was and is from my own experience really nice and much better for text compared to 4:3.
I still use 5:4 and absolutely love it. It plays nice with a 16:9 public display at 720p.
I used 3 EIZO S-PVA monitors for many years. 22" 16:10 1920x1200 as main screen, 2x 19" 5:4 1280x1024 left and right - exact same height, perfect fit.
When the 3:4 on my FreeDOS system was hit by lightning, I tried to order another, but what showed up with FedEX turned out to be a 5:4.
Don't forget the closer to square 1.19:1 in "The Lighthouse". Really adds to the feeling of claustrophobia. Or the 1:1 ratio of "Mommy" which almost appears like it's shot in portrait. And speaking of that, the rise of social media (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, CZcams Shorts) means people are getting more comfortable with (shudder) vertical video.
I hate vertical video unless I'm on my phone where it makes more sense. I also wish CZcams allowed regular horizontal videos to be shorts instead of forcing you to use that ridiculous format. Granted, most people consuming shorts will likely be on their phones.
It's funny how the ratio between people who shoot video in portrait on their cell phones and that I don't want to talk to them are 1:1.
@@mattbreef Meanwhile the camera sensors are usually 3:4, so vertical shots are just chopping off the sides for no reason
I don't understand why we need awful vertical videos when people could just be sane and turn their phone on its side. Even on phones I don't want to watch a vertical video, and I never use their camera that way.
It makes no sense, as the human field of view extends further on the horizontal plane. That's why the people shooting these videos rarely ever make use of the top and bottom of the frame, unless it's to fill it with their head.
I remember around 2015 a video going viral chastising people for filming vertical... now don´t you even dare doing a marketing pitch that it's NOT vertical video
That clip about shooting the dog is gold.
Do you want John Wick? Because this is how you get John Wick.
Vertical aspect ratios recorded on cellphones are just annoying, even when watching it on a cellphone. It just showcases how amateur the filmmakers are anymore.
I found that strategy games play better (for me anyway) on 4:3 aspect ratio, because I don't have to move the mouse as much to the sides of the screen to pan the camera.
Strategy games CAN play better on 4:3 because you really want a square-ish area to direct troops (plus your command sidebar). And generally you want map areas to also be pretty even vertically and horizontally. But classic games were also way too zoomed in. Because you had to be three feet above the battlefield for a sub-1000 pixel monitor to give any detail. Give me a square command area, and also a good zoom. I've seen some retro clones do one other other, but not always both.
I think the resolution on the monitors and games were very low back then, so RTS games can feel very cramped in on 4:3. Large pixalated blobs of characters, with any smaller being likely lost in the grain/noise of limited pixels on the screen.
I suppose since 4k and even 8k is a thing now, I guess games now don't necessarily have to be as cramped in as before to be legible.
@@skycloud4802 Yeah, I meant something modern like Starcraft 2 or CoH. You can for example play the game at 1920x1440 on a 2560x1440 display and effectively get the 4:3 aspect ratio that is very high in resolution.
With older games there isn't much you can do since the art assets are literally 2D pixel art.
who moves the camera by moving the mouse to the edge?? you can bind buttons on the keyboard for panning
Brother, just hold down right click or middle click and pan.
I would get physically sick from playing a strategy game exclusively by moving the cursor to the edge
in 1994, me and a few friends chipped in to watch the pay per view Woodstock 94 show, it was advertised as being "Presented in HDTV" but none of us had HDTV at the time, we just watched it on a large CRT. But now years later I would like to see woodstock 94 in HDTV, but none of the footage I have seen is nearly HD.
Very few ways to record HDTV in 1994. I don't think D-Theatre was even out at the time.
@@3rdalbum yes but shouldn't the network have an archive of the footage in HD? Or was the broadcast literally ONLY broadcasted in HD and their archive copy is 480p? That would be extremely confusing!
I appreciate you leaving the ad read to the end. I appreciate it enough that I watched all the way to the end of the video. Many thanks. The video in and of itself was great.
I've been a movie and aspect ratio nerd for years, and I didn't know most of these details. What a great video!
It is amazing people back then had the scope of vision to expand our scope of vision.
I think this is simply planning and like.. the logical or _scientific_ way of doing things. Logistics. Efficiency.
Large organizational efforts to make big changes affecting millions of people tend to put large amounts of work understanding as much as they can before making a hopefully very informed decision. This is my observation.
Noice...
Or they understood the 'scope' of cameras were limited, much easier conclusion to deduce. edit cause I got laughing! Imagine an employee at Kodak in the 80's "Yep, that camera shows MORE than 16.8 mil/colors, WAY better then the HUMAN eye.....OBVISOULY."
But widescreen doesn't do that. Wider screens are shorter screens. Wide screen moview formats were mainly implemented by just cutting off the top and bottom of the film with a mask; comparatively few used a cylindrical lens to squash the image. You're automatically thinking of widescreen as a 4:3 image but wider; but if resources (resolution, number of pixels, number of silver salt particles, shader performance etc) is limited it is just a different allocation of resources; more resolution on one axis and less on another.
For movies the purpose is that it was easier to grow screens on the horizontal axis. You can't really raise the roof, but you can knock down walls or add more crappy seats on the sides. The ulterior motive was that it also makes the home movie experience worse; which is a benefit if you operate a cinema. Once TVs, which were the bigger market; had settled on some kind of compromise (16:9) which is between 4:3 and 21:9, this change was largely forced on computer monitors. There's a huge volume of 16:9 displays and you can buy one of the ones already existing and make a computer monitor or you can spin up your own production line for 4:3 or 16:10 and make a low volume product which adds a lot of cost.
16:9 didn't win on merrit.
whats funny is even with the wider tv's and monitors, we STILL have the black bars at the top and bottom of the picture when watching most movies around that era where the switch happened.
Back in the day ya baked in the black bars into the video instead of letting the monitor/TV or video-player add them if needed, which means that if ya play a "widescreen DVD" on a modern 16:9 screen, it will get double black-bars (Both sides and top-bottom) since it's a cropped 16:9 video inside a 4.3 video played on a 16:9 monitor.
If the people who makes the new release cares they could crop the black bars with tools thus letting the actual video scale to fit whatever monitor ya use to watch it.
16:9 is a compromise, so that you can watch 4:3, play 16:9 and watch 21:9 movies.
@@tbthegr81 CHEAP widescreen DVDs. In my experience, most retail DVDs were anamorphic widescreen with only bargain bin DVDs being letterboxed.
@@turrican4d599you can also rotate 90 degrees and get the full naked person in there
@@tbthegr81 Channel 4 app/website has this annoying habit of cropping 4:3 at all sides, so black bars at bottom and top and left and right of image even if you set tv/monitor to 4:3 resolutions in fact that just makes it worse I wish I could just download the episode then play it the way I need on my player but thats not an option.
The most annoying thing about the transition from 4:3 to 16:9 is that old 4:3 content (e.g., all TV shows up until the 2000s) often gets hacked down to 16:9 now when released for home video / streaming, or broadcast on TV. Seinfeld on Blu-ray is one of many examples. If I ruled the world, releasing content that was originally intended to be 4:3, in any aspect ratio other than 4:3, would be highly illegal.
did you know? the htf classics remastered versions were properly extended to 16:9
@@gamecubeplayer I don't know what "htf" refers to, but if the original aspect ratio was 4:3 then that's how it should stay.
@@MaximRecoil the original aspect ratio was 4:3 but it was properly extended to 16:9 by adding new stuff to the sides
@@gamecubeplayer That can only be done with cartoons.
They should leave things alone. By extending a cartoon to 16:9, people who want to watch it as it originally aired on the type of TV that it was intended to be viewed on (4:3 TV) can't do it unless they re-encode the video to crop it back to 4:3 (which would only be feasible if they added equal amounts of new content to each side rather than varying the left/right distribution from scene to scene); otherwise they get stuck with letterboxing and superfluous new content on the sides.
People who want to watch something in the way that was originally intended by the creators should take precedence over people who want to retcon old stuff to fit their new TVs. But the people who want to retcon stuff are part of the "lowest common denominator," and companies make the most money by catering to them.
@@MaximRecoilwho'd want to watch the 1080p classics remastered versions on a 480i tv?
Outstanding video good sir. You got that nostalgia, that nerd, and a space between them in some sort of order. Gonna rewatch a few times!
And IMAX is back to square again.....
And 3:2 laptops too.
For the few movies that actually use 1.43 IMAX scenes, they're usually cropped to 16:9 or whatever the rest of the film is in normal theatres for the home release. Good way of dealing with it imo since the extra image is really just to make it feel more immersive, and the closest you can get to replicating that at home is by filling the whole screen.
@@PUFR-FSHunfortunately they actually tend to crop the whole thing to 2.39:1 for home releases… Only exceptions I can think of are Top Gun Maverick, Tron Legacy, and the original HD version of The Dark Knight (which was cropped when it got updated to 4K…). Disney+ has a few exclusive releases in “IMAX enhanced” format also, but that’s not an official home release.
There was nothing stopping 50's movie makers from filming with wide angle lenses on 4:3 film, and making cinema screens bigger in both directions like Imax. So Cinemascope, Vistavision and Panavision should never have been invented saving us from decades of black bars cropping, squished mages, anamorphic focusing distortions, and ugly anamorphic lens flares. When I build my time machine that is the first historical tragedy I am fixing.
4:3 master race
16 : 10 is a requirement for me now. Or at least 1600 vertical resolution. You wouldn't think that small amount over 1440 would make a difference, but it does.
My iiyama vision master pro 455 likes a 'maximum' 1600x1200, closest I can get is 1920x1440 and text is VERY sharp... unfortunately it also means running a CRT at 65hz, which hurts. XD
21:9 144hz minimum
It's definitely a major difference
For my computer monitors, I exclusively use 16:10. I used to have a 21:9, 4:3, and 5:4 monitors but have ditched them for 16:10. I have never personally used a 16:9 256x1440 panel for more than a few hours, but I have used a 1920x1080 16:9. My old monitors were 1920x1200 and even that difference between 1080 and 1200 is large. I picked up some Dell U3023e 2560x1600 monitors late last year and I am never going back to any other aspect ratio.
Sucks that there are no 120Hz 16:10 monitors.
That was about the most coherent explanation of TV and aspect ratio I've seen. Great!
I'm no scientist, and yet ill argue: we see in landscape mode cuz we have 2 eyes, we have 2 eyes to see 3D, no adding another eye won't let us see 4D btw, I think that's why its more comfortable to view content in this format, even if the aspect ratio isn't as close to the golden rule as 4:3 (just Google fibbonaccis numbers, and ull know)
I do still prefer 16 : 10 for computers. It’s just nice to have that extra bit of vertical space for most tasks and the black bars on 16:9 content are not that bad. I prefer horizontal black bars over vertical black bars anyway.
Yes, but 16:9 monitors are so much better and cheaper for reasons that are not meritocratic (high volume means cheap; TV going with 16:9 means 16:9 monitors are high volume by proxy). It would be cheaper to just buy a 16:9 monitor and use 16:10 resolution on it and accept the black bars. You can just define 2304x1440 as a custom resolution if you want, no problem.
i only operate on circular screens. evil spirits hide in the corners...
hahaha
average android smartwatch user
I play GameCube on a round-screen TV. The roundness pairs nicely with the cubeness.
In case you thought this was a joke, it's not. I actually do. I've repaired an ancient 1949 TV and back then everything had a round picture tube for ease of manufacturing. Usually only a rectangular section of the tube is visible but I will always know that it's round on the inside.
@@eDoc2020 you get what i had in mind at the time ;) old CRTs were round. easier to make. surprisingly hard to make a rectangular vacuum chamber from glass... funny, that. lol.
Like the thinking
Excellent content and really living up to your handle, a lot of nostalgia for me seeing all those old movies!
at 15:34 when you show off the 4:3 TV which is presumably in your office, you are still displaying an image with an aspect ratio of 16:9 - ya silly goose! It would have made more sense to show us a 4:3 image on the game. I mean, it's really just an observation and something to giggle at. I thought the video was great! Thanks for the content!
Just a small factoid on how the BBC went to widescreen 16x9 back in the late 1990s to early 2000s.. they didn’t.
We (I was a cameraman back then for the corporation), had to film “shoot to protect”, which meant we didn’t shoot for 16X9 but for 14X9.
This was a compromise for transmission.
1K in 1999
2K in 2000s
3K in 2010s
4K in 2020s...
The future is interesting whether the px count doubles every 10 years : -)
@@pistool1 3K to 4K wouldn't be a doubling, i think you mean increasing by 1K :)
Oh yeah, even in the 2010s you still had that in some places. I was taught animation that way, to always consider 4:3 aspect ratio, even though there were no box tvs sold by then
16:10 1920x1200 monitors have one super nice advantage, you can use integer scaling to upscale a 320x200 image to 1600x1200 and it will fit on the display and be aspect correct with no scaling artefacts. Great for playing old dos games on your modern system.
Wouldn't that be 320x240? 320x200 would scale to 1600x1000.
@@massivepileup No. 320x200 was a 4:3 format, but with non-square pixels. CRTs didn’t need to have square pixels, while LCDs do.
You use a 5x scaling factor horizontally but a 6x factor vertically
Square pixels *are* scaling artefacts. Actual low-res displays don't have them.
@@dmitryurbanovich4748 CGA displays were relatively high resolution because they needed to legibly display the 640px text modes. I haven't used an actual CGA PC monitor but on same-resolution arcade machines with non-trashed tubes I can clearly make out individual pixels.
This was awesome. Great research job and well presented. Thank you! Really enjoyed this.
Television in the mid 1950s and early 1960s was emptying the movie theaters. So... CinemaScope, Panavision, Todd AO, Cinerama used a wide screen format to lure patrons back to movies. Later VHS tapes in Letterbox were used to show these older home movies on 4:3 televisions.
For me it was the "Flat screen" thing. I grew up with CRT's and when "HD ready" (720p) screens came out i always wanted one but could not afford it. Then came "Full HD" 1080p, the prices went down enough i could eventually get one (well into teens at this point nearly my 20s). I moved out and no longer was my small 15" TV going to work, i needed something bigger i had my own room and place now. There was also the whole aspect ratio thing and resolution nothing was really made in 4:3 anymore and bigger 4:3 CRT TV's were rare or the same/more than a "Full HD" flat screen. The flat screen was essentially the only smart option for a multitude of reasons.
I love my 16:9 CRT
I feel like this glossed over how early computer monitors borrowed directly from TV technology, which explains why they mostly stuck to the 4:3 ratio. There were a few "dumb" terminals that had wider ratios, but they were fairly uncommon as far as I know.
I think your memory also differs from mine with the whole 16:9 vs. 16:10 ratio for computer monitors. 16:9 seemed to be the most common from what I'd seen, and I know I had to hunt a bit when I got the 16:10 one I'm currently using. For people using the common 1024x768 or 1280x1024 (an oddball 5:4 ratio), going to a 1920x1080 was an upgrade, but there were a lot of people like me who had used quad-SVGA 1600x1200 monitors who would feel squished going to the standard HDTV size.
I also don't recall a lot of 16:10 monitors, except in laptops, where they were using less expensive displays.
Well, decent PC displays moved from XGA, to SXGA, to UXGA (from 4:3 to 5:4 to 4:3). WUXGA (16:10) was a compromise between the hordes of full-hd displays and UXGA, but indeed not all that common.
Laptop lcd panels either used the desktop standards or the wide variants, most consumer laptops moved to wide: WXGA 1280/800 (16:10), and the so-called "HD" 1360 or 1366 by 768 (about 16:9) - God, I hated these things. They were too narrow to show websites well, and too low res to scale out content decently.
I still despise 16:9 for anything but movie viewing. 16:10 is a good compromise, and barely works as a useful portrait display.
But the choices are made for me, my workstation has one 16:9 and one 16:10 display.
I'd like to see more square displays in computing devices, honestly. Vision focus is mostly circular, and the less you move that around the less fatigue. GUI elements are mostly at the margins of the display. Jogging from a toolbar on the left to a panel on the right is really annoying and tiresome on a wide screen. Although it does work if you arrange peripheral content on one side and keep important elements on the other.
16:9 is horrible, I have to use the Start Bar of the operating system vertically because of that, so I get more vertical space.
1680x1050 LCD monitors were very common in the late 2000s. They were the best compromise halfway between 720p and 1080p (900p wasn't quite tall enough for desktop use) and much easier to drive for the GPUs of the time than 1080p.
I still use 1280x1024 and 5:4 in a dual screen setup with an auxiliary screen at 720p because they play so nice together.
I remember when widescreen CRT's were first starting to become a thing, almost no TV was broadcast in 16:9 at this point. A friend of mine became an early adopter, and would stretch everything he watched from 4:3 to 16:9. I was not at all knowledgeable on the whole deal at that point in my life, and was left with the impression that widescreen TV was literally watching everything in a distorted wide ratio, which I thought was ridiculous. When I eventually bought a widescreen LCD years later, I still didn't understand it very much and unwittingly backed the wrong horse by buying a 16:10. Yes, it could be set to display in a 16:9 ratio. But the thin black bars were a constant ridicule of my mistake.
I remember when IT wanted to swap out my 1600x1200 monitor with 1920x1080. Losing that vertical resolution annoyed me to no end. Suddenly dual monitors became far more prevalent in the office and the best setups were one horizontal plus one vertical. When 3440x1440 started showing up, I all but forced IT to set me up with one. It didn't take long for people to see me dock windows 3-wide with no bezel in between and instantly want an ultrawide of their own... with the IT guys being first in line.
A good modern alternative would be 3:2. Not very cinematic though, incredibly productive for basically every PC workload.
Scrolling Twitter isn't work. :)
@@CoreDreamStudios 3:2 is great for a tablet or laptop
@@Tomtycoon For sure.
You can have multiple windows aside with 16:9. With 3:2 you only have one big window
@@CoreDreamStudios X works fine on half of my screen. The other half can be still productive.
GLASGOW MENTIONED!!!
It's interesting how everyone says all wider movies were cropped for those pesky 4:3 displays during those times, but... ...to my knowledge and from observations, only those anamorphic scope movies (2.35:1) were in fact cropped from sides, those seen in "flat" 1.85:1 were in fact "opened" so you'd actually see too damn much as they used normal film and stuff and shot it in 4:3 and then framed for 1.85:1 later (you could choose which bit of the height to use with that). 1.66:1 was sometimes left as-is. And some old ass "widescreen" tapes (technically 4:3 with black bars, just like DVD's that do that are) do exist. Same scope cropping and the opening of others carried to VHS and such, but at the end of the life of 4:3, it was usually all letterboxed anyway, be it a VHS (even 2.35:1 was letterboxed with that), TV broadcast (outside movies, and they probably still mangle those to this very day) or somethingsomething. Though as I live in PAL region, I dunno how things were in NTSC-land at the end of 4:3 times, all I know is 'Murica really liked their "Full screen" DVD's they got all the time, unlike Europe. But the 2.35:1 cropping and 1.85:1 opening was a thing, people just assume all wideness was simply cropped only because some definitely are.
Thanks for breaking down CinemaScope! I’ve always loved your videos (and books,) this is yet another great production. Hats off to you my friend
Just so you know, 99% of pro Counter Strike players still use 4/3 ratio on 16/10 monitors, either with blackbars or by streching the image. Why ? Nobody knows...
it makes player models slightly wider at the cost of some FOV
We love our Counter-Strike. It seems Nostalgia Nerd may be inclined, too.
I love its esports scene!
They may feel it's less information and thus it helps them to focus on on the specific _"holding of angles"_ that they do. I think their eyes train in on a specific area.
@@yungclean666 so its easier to shot them, makes sense, kinda cheaty
@@monad_tcp it is not easier. They are just used to it and/or are doing it because other pros do it. Some pros (like device) have regretted the decision, but it is difficult to go back.
A friend of mine plays literally every game in 4:3 stretched to 16:9 to get the stupid stretched models for the supposed competitive advantage. Rust, Valorant, Fortnite, you name it, they stretch it out regardless of the compatibility issues or aesthetic sensibility.
5:4 was a widely used aspect ratio on desktop pcs in Europe. I had a 1280x1024 screen around 2003-2006 and it provided a really fine working real state then.
Not just Europe. 1280x1024 was the go-to for quite a while, AFAIK, everywhere.
I'm still using a couple of Dell 1280x1024 monitors for work. They're not close to new but I think they were manufactured between 2015-2019. I like that ratio but would prefer my wife's laptop resolution of 2560x1600 because it's sharper. The work monitors have an added benefit, though. I didn't have to pay for them.
Very informative video. I always found it a coincidence that the 16:9 format is the numbers in 4:3 squared
Vistavision was 8 perf 35mm run sideways at a ratio of 1.5 to 1 and could easily be cropped for standard 35mm "flat" prints. The 1.85 and 1.66 ratios were originally just a cheaper way to get a wider image onto 35mm film using sperical lenses without an anamorphic by cropping the top and bottom of the image during projection (3 perf height out of the 4 perf frame) gave 1.66 to 1 which was more common in the UK and 2.5 perf height out of the 4 gave 1.85 to 1, which became the standard in the US. Vistavision was not involved in the creation of these ratios, and was not a projection format (just a shooting format) but was a way to get 3 times the detail onto the negative which allowed for higher quality standard "flat" print for use in theatres (vertically-run 35mm) due to the Vistavision negative having more detail than if the movie had been shot the standard way with vertically-running 4-perf 35mm with the intention to use 2,5 or 3 perf height for widescreen during projection.
15:40 the most popular tablet was 4:3 for the longest time until just a couple years ago when it was modernized: the iPad. Now they're 3:2 or something.
The cheapest Ipad available is still 4:3, but it's a older model. I wonder how long it will still be sold.
They're not still 4:3? Pretty sure mine is. I got a Pro 11" just before the M1 launch, so it IS a couple years old.
MKBHD had a video where someone asked him "what's your desert-island aspect ratio?" and his opinion was 4:3, because it's the most versatile when you can't assume orientation will always be portrait or landscape. I have to agree, which is why it made sense on the iPad. (Although 5:4 would be fine, too.)
@@nickwallette6201 I just looked it up to make sure I'm not saying anything wrong.
The 11" iPad Pro (the re-design without home button) isn't 4:3, it's a very small amount wider putting it inbetween 4:3 and 3:2, however the 12.9" is still 4:3. Dunno about the new 13" though.
I always thought both iPad pros had the same AR and only the old iPad design with home button was the last one left with 4:3.
And yes I prefer iPads for their AR as well, it's better for everything except watching movies.
i utterly adore 16:10
i hope it makes a come back with desktop monitors
16:10 club checking in 👍
I completely agree.
for laptops it 100% made a huge comeback and monitors are finally starting to adopt it again.
3:2 is the best, imo
Minimal black bars for modern or retro content and just felt like your eyes have vertical space without stepping on the toes of the horizontal skew of the display
Long live 16:10 ! It's absolutely spot on with the 1920x1200 resolution.
Best for PC daily use & also enhances games. Also adore how it offers movies a perfectly designated space for subtitles.
Wish there were more Hi-Performance 1920x1200 desktop monitors available on the market.
And then today, the most popular aspect ratio is 9:16. Seriously, the amount of people who know that a cell phone can shoot video in landscape mode is like 0.00001%.
I have a friend who absolutely HATES having any black space on the screen. His TV is set to stretch every picture, regardless of the original aspect ratio, to fill every inch of the screen. This makes anything in 4:3 look like crap.
Personally, while I watch movies on a 16:9 screen (letterboxed if necessary), I still use a 4:3 Dell monitor for my computer.It may sound trivial, but one of the reasons I really like this one is that the stand can not only raise and lower, turn left/right, and tilt up/down, the screen can also be rotated 90 degrees, which is great for emulated games that display sideways on the screen to mimic a tall aspect ratio.
Thank you for this, I've always wondered but have never found the motivation to find out!
Oh 4:3 my beloved, I'm glad more people are paying attention to you. Perhaps not as good for FPS gaming, but a fantastic framing ratio for TV and animation. Narrow enough a shot of one person isn't awkward, and wide enough it can still fit 2 people, or a shot of a building or street.
And tall enough to waste half the screen height with black bars when watching a 2.39:1 widescreen movie 😅
@@Ni5ei So make your movie in 4:3 like the Motion Picture Academy intended? 😉
Not to forget that Europe planned to settle for 16:9 1250 lines with the HD-MAC standard and a 625 16:9 D2-MAC standard as sort of transition. Oh, and the PAL-PLUS 16:9 625 standard that was backwards compatible with old 4:3 sets.
kinda makes sense to just double the number of lines, that would probably make things a lot easier than going for a new arbitrary resolution/line number.
I think they should have gone with 2048*1152. It's 16:9 with square pixels, and you can just double PAL content to fit.
Neat. I have been asking myself this exact question lately, as i bought a laptop with 3:2 ratio. Which works better for doing work, but perhaps not so useful for films. Still you don't really notice the black bars.
I've wanted to know this for ages! Great video! thanks
Awesome mini documentary. Keep on rocking in the free world and toodeloo
I don't buy the "16:10 is because two paper" theory though. For one thing, that would actually be 1.44:1, instead of 1.6:1; for another thing, the earliest LCD monitors were actually 5:4, if anyone still remembers. 16:10 really started with laptops, which makes the desktop publishing angle seems wrong.
The wider the ratio, the cheaper the panel is for a given diagonal. Laptop and monitor manufacturers have been going for wider and wider monitors for a while partly because they can claim the same (or even larger) size of diagonal, but actually have less area. Think about the 34-in or even 47-in ultrawides these days.
A story I heard long ago from Sony was that their first 16:10 VAIO PCs choose this ratio was because they wanted to have playback controls displayed under a full 16:9 video without occluding the video. Whether that's true or not I'll probably never know.
A lot of modern productivity laptops seems to have settled for 3:2 (15:10) though. Microsoft said that they think the ratio gives the most vertical workspace without sacrificing keyboard width (if narrower) or touchpad height (if taller).
Letter or A4 paper?
@@MultiMidden
A4 is 1.414
Letter is 1.294
Legal is 1.65
11x17 is 1.55
I still use 16x10 until those screens burn out. And having the controls not obsurce as much of the video is great
There's still nothing productive about filling your entire screen with the material to work on, you need the extra edge frames for your toolsets. Bezel minimization is just marketing nonsense, as if BEHIND the small bezel is some cosmic void you don't have to see.
A MONITOR literally means you render a complete video feed, to monitor, on a SEPARATE display. It's a term from the context of security camera CONSOLES. Even sea navigational tools are monitors.
I prefer vertical displays because I can just add whatever junk or mood lighting or subtitles, ON the "letterboxing". It's why letter boxes are no taller than it takes to deposit a letter. Same applies to image projection, they take what they take.
16:9 was a compromise ratio, its not good at all on anything smaller than a 27", its why 16:10 and higher are coming back on smaller screens, 24" 16:10 was very good for productivity.
Very well put together video. Fascinating facts, and thought provoking subject matter.
🔥 the amount of research, cross checks, analysis and filtering for the final draft🤍💙which must have gone in this production is mind boggling!🌹👍🏼👌🏼
This was really good. Well researched!
Did not expect too see your comment. Your content is great, thanks for all the good videos.
Sponsored by AMD... Now that's a impressive sponsor imo. Great video mate.
WOW thank you for this video-- i finally understand what the heck happened with all my screen resolutions over the years. Very interesting! :D
Continually inventive and always great content on this channel
Thanks for making
Fascinating history - one thing I recall is that on 4:3 laptops there was a lot of wasted space on the keyboard area albeit the mouse pad could absorb some of that - 16:9 can be annoying when constantly scrolling or not being able to see "most" of a document for example in comparison. Similarly having a 32" 16:9 "HD ready " (720p - bleh!) TV was amazing going from a 21" CRT apart from most content was still 4:3 so had black bars down the sides which was less worse than black bars top and bottom - then the issue of DVD players trying to stretch 4:3 into 16:9 which looked hideous 🤮
i always thought it was something to do with just squaring both numbers (4 & 3 squared = 16 & 9).
but being the most efficient way to show all aspect ratios is a hell of a good solution
Same. I figured it had something to do with having two eyes horizontally, so power of two for a more rectangle shape or some nonsense. Glad this video cleared stuff up.
It does also have to do with being the square. And 64:27 - sorry, I mean "21:9" - was chosen for being the cube
"but being the most efficient way to show all aspect ratios is a hell of a good solution"
No, it was stupid, because there was practically no existing content for 16:9 (1.78:1). They obviously should have gone with 1.85:1, which is only slightly wider, not enough of a difference to meaningfully affect their concept of an "ideal resolution," but it would have made it so that many thousands of already-existing movies dating back to the early 1950s (and technically back to 1895; it was the first widescreen aspect ratio; look up "Eidoloscope"), and plenty of future movies, would have perfectly fit the new widescreen TVs.
I first encountered 16:9 HDTV in the lab I worked at circa 1995. It was 1025i with overscan, because the standard was designed for CRT displays. There was talk in the industry about switching to 1080, but it still carried over all the wasted bandwidth on overscan, and on vertical and horizontal refresh timing. To this day, LCD tvs with a native panel resolution of 1920x1080 upscale broadcast HDTV 5% and crop 5% off the edges.
I don't really know anything about this technically, but isn't that just the "overscan" function that you can turn off on modern TVs? I know it's switchable on my OLED and I have it switched off for 16:9 content.
@@zzhoward Yes it is.
Excellent documentary. Thank you. It gave me nostalgic vibes. I would like to ad another reason why TV screens were changed to a 16:9 ratio. Back around 1990 or 1991 I was participating at a meeting regarding the implementation of HD and 16:9 into TV Sets. Back at that time I was working with a technical dept. of a TV broadcaster in Germany. I was also participating as a member of a technical work group, part of a lobby organization in behalf of private TV-broadcasters. So we had a meeting once at the Department (Ministry) of postal services and telecommunications in Bonn. It was a very large meeting with participants from all kind of organizations. Including members of the lobby group of the companies producing consumer electronics. What stay in my mind is that they wanted to change the screen ratio because then consumers will be forced to by new TV sets and monitors. So the companies are going to benefit from the change.
9:47 Oh, so THAT'S where Rec.709 comes from!
601, 2020 and 2100 too and all the others.
Fascinating how the original aspect was established.
I was just staring blankly at my widescreen tv last night and was wondering why things changed, thanks for the timely info
@10:35 this is why you watch with subtitles on even if you understand the language, these little gems
😂
05:40 massive nostalgia hit right there, I had a very similar desk back in the late 90's.
Because eyes naturally scan left to right rather than up and down
I love that you used the actual 2011 steam page instead of just a modern one
Love the font at the end!
The black bars meant "we're watching a Movie". :)
Nowadays I want a 4:3 bruh just for the nostalgia, I grew up playing my friends' computers and most of them are 4:3, windows 7, and GTA SA and bunch of other old games hahaha I really want it
It's not hard to find some CRT or computer monitor for free and you just need to clean them up and give em a house, you should try, just spread the word around friends and family and it will come up, people really don't want them, I got two on my desk right now and I love em.
4:3 is fun for emulating old games
so do it. you can game in 4:3 on original hardware for less than $250 total. I managed to set up a standard def gaming set up for around $120
WHY didn't I get a notification for this 😭😭
So happy to see new videos from new each time
Great video (as always)! Thanks
I switched to filming in 4:3 for my channel a few years ago. Now to find an HD 4:3 monitor.
Look for a Dell 2007FP with the LG IPS display. Look at the last digit of the serial number on the 2007FP. If it ends in S, it is the Samsung VA panel. You do not want the VA version. If it ends in a L, you have a LG IPS. The resolution on these are 1600x1200, which as far as I know, is the best 4:3 flatscreen monitor. If you're willing to break away from the 4:3 aspect and want a good compromise, there is the BenQ RD280U with a resolution of 3840x2560, being a 3:2 aspect ratio 28 inch monitor. 3:2 is an inbetween aspect ratio for 16:10 and 4:3, though it is closer to the 16:10.
@@bill_clinton697 Hmm, 3:2 now? I could go for that. But come oooon, another aspect ratio?
@@bill_clinton697 Man, I hope 3:2 becomes a more common aspect ratio. It feels so comfortable natively, and both 4:3 and 16:9/10 look good on it (if you don't mind small black bars).
@@bill_clinton697 Nah they have a monitor now that is close to 4k 4:3, I just want a cheaper one. 1600x1200 is laughably small these days.
Somewhat related fact: you can display a 4:3 picture on a 16:9 monitor by creating a custom resolution of 1440x1080 (for fullHD), 1920x1440 (WQHD) or 2880x2160 (4K).
This is better than simply choosing a random other 4:3 resolution because they are pixel-accurate. If you use, say, a 1600x1200 resolution on a 2560x1440 display, it will have to interpolate said resolution to fill the appropriate screen space (unless otherwise specified in driver). On the other hand, the 1920x1440 already has the exact number of vertical pixels, so no interpolation is needed. As for horizontal, the graphics card simply renders and outputs 1920 out of possible 2560 pixels, once again, with no interpolation (unless you set it to "fill" in driver), simply leaving "black bars" on the sides.
Obviously, you can do the same trick to display a 16:9 frame on a 4:3 monitor, but I didn't calculate the pixel ratios since this is irrelevant in modern tech.
Why would you want to avoid interpolation? Generally, GPUs do bilinear scaling, which is rather damn ugly, especially in videogames. You can check it yourself any time you want, just pick a resolution lower than your monitor's native.
In fact, I've yet to see a decent quality spatial scaler: bilinear, bicubic, LS1, lanczos, FSR1 - even though some are better than others, none compares to native per-pixel accuracy.
Fascinating. How do we create a custom resolution?
@@JB-mm5ff _n00b version:_ use driver control panel (nVidia control panel or radeon adrenaline software; should be somewhere under display settings, haven't used this method for *many* years though, so you'll have to search where exactly this is) ;;
_advanced version:_ use CRU (custom resolution utility)
As for the individual games, *most* of them scan for available resolutions and then show it in your game settings, but few (e.g. Doom 3, Quake 4, RtCW, Unreal, DeusEx, etc.) have only a preset choice of resolutions without mods - in that case you can edit the game's config file to input the desired dimensions (doomconfig.cfg for Doom 3 in /base folder, quake4config.cfg in /q4base folder, wolfconfig.cfg for RtCW in /main folder, unreal.ini for Unreal in /system folder, deusex.ini for Deus Ex in /system folder, etc.).
If it's still too complicated, don't worry, PC gaming community may occasionally be friendly enough to accept even less able individuals, incapable of extensive google search, practical application of theoretical data and/or working out solutions while operating under conditions of information deficiency.
@@JB-mm5ff there was an answer here, but YT deleted it for some reason.
@@JB-mm5ff in short, use control panel (nVidia) / adrenaline software (AMD).
CRU (custom resolution utility) is also an option, but for more advanced users.
It's a great video. Very informative. You could have mentioned a few words though on (for me) the biggest horror in the aspect ratio transformation. Streched pictures. Or overly cropped pictures that only show an eye and a nose which was once a full face on the original source. And nobody seeming to care 😭
Fascinating as always. So PCs had whatever their productivity needed, but movies needed something more dramatic than what could be seen at home.
So that's why iMax brought it around to more 4/3 again- more exciting than boring old stay-at-home widescreen.
"People are like lady birds, never happy" Female birds are unhappy? What?
I wish they made 4:3 monitors that had good refresh rates. I just want squares again dammit
Same, I would totally buy a 4:3 1440p (1920x1440) 144Hz monitor. It would be cheaper than a standard 16:9 1440p monitor while still retaining the high clarity
@@RotcodFoxa 1920x1440 monitor could also pixel perfectly display letterboxed 1920x1080
@@RotcodFox No it would be more expensive. It would be much cheaper to make a 2560x1440 144 Hz and just define a custom 1920x1440 resolution and set scaling appropriately so it leaves black bars.
16:9 won because TVs went 16:9. This made 16:9 monitors a high volume product by proxy (there were lots of cheap 16:9 displays you could use; starting a new line for 4:3 or 16:10 won't be able to compete on cost because it would be low volume).
@ 13:50 good old California in Germany.... We call it Mecklenburg Vorpommern 🏖
nice video 😁
I still use a 21 Inch sharp CRT TV as my main tv in 2024 and it still works like a charm surprisingly through my satellite dth almost all channels run at 4:3 aspect ratio without black bars which makes it more enjoyable
Real interesting. May that 1.85 is why im always drawn to middle of the movie theater since i was a kid in the mid 90s
Does anyone like to sit on the sides?
@@christianterrill3503 2 of my ex girlfriends did
@@christianterrill3503 If you are farther back it's not as bad. I always prefer the middle but on the sides because if I have to get up during the film I'm not tripping over everyone.
Robocop? Terminator? I'm glad you didn't mention the Fallout, which had black/white TVs in 2077.
There were lore reasons for that though.
Fallout actually takes place in an alternative history, not just in the future. In the Fallout timeline, basically, the microchip was never invented, so the consumer electronics technology got stuck in the 1950s (mostly).
@@Mrqwertar Transistor, not microchip, all the TVs and radios are still powered by vacuum tubes.
besides, even if there wasn't an explicit "lore reason" it fits the retro-futuristic aesthetic they're going for.
When I was a kid, movies on tape displayed a disclaimer that said something like "This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your TV."
Formatting adjustments were something we just lived with. It was expected, and in that era, most people preferred the TV screen to be filled with no black bars.
You could still get widescreen versions, but you had to rent or buy a version with that specification, and it would automatically have the black bars. We called it the "letterbox" version.
Good heavens, I feel old.
Completely fascinating! 👌🏼