Philips to launch 21:9 ratio "cinematic" televisions

Comments

• "...for black bar haters." this is an ironic title since people who buy this TV will have more black bars than ever. Zero components that I know will send a 21:9 signal meaning all 16:9 signals will either be cropped and zoomed leading to zero increase of resolution or they will be displayed with black bars on the left and right and best of all when 21:9 movies are being played they will have black bars on all 4 sides unless the movie is zoomed in, again, no better resolution. This is simply a bad idea with the current standards. TiVo, game consoles, network TV, etc. will all have black bars.
  
  If you want a 56" 21:9 experience go buy a 58" 16:9 TV and deal with the black bars. The movie will be bigger than on the 56" 21:9 (do the math) and all 16:9 content will properly fill up the screen. Posted by Eric, USA
• Sorry, It's the same size as a 59" (since those aren't available pick up a 60") Posted by Eric, USA
• Home cinema PC will do the output, but thats about it.
  I'm guessing the screen crops the image, and has a similar dot pitch to a 60"
  Normal widescreen and 4:3 will look terrible.
  
  Posted by Pete, uk
• Eric and Pete, for anyone who is into home cinema using projectors, this is quite interesting.
  
  On DVD and Blue-Ray, 2.35-2.39 films are stored using the full width (1920) but only about 820 of the 1080 height. When displayed on a 16:9 screen you get black bars. People interested in a real cinema experience often go for what are called Constant Image Height setups, which involves investing in either a scaler which takes that input at vertically stretches it to 1920x1080, or buying a projector that has a built in scaler such as the JVC DLA-HD750 or Sony VPL-VW80 (it can also be done on the fly on a powerful HTPC).
  
  The next step is to use an anamorphic les or prism system which stretches the image horizontally by 1.33. The cheaper prism systems are about ~$2000, which a good lens like an ISCO or Schneider is in the region of $4-5000!
  
  A screen to go with this setup such as a Da-Lite, Carada, or Stewart FireHawk will set you back another $1-3000.
  
  Total investment is for just image is going to be anywhere from $5000 to $20000. And this is still just scaled input.
  
  Believe me, there is a market for innovation, and a screen that has a resolution of 2560x1080 may not have anything that can feed it today, but maybe tomorrow we will see film's on support like Blu-Ray that are natively encoded in this format.
  
  If the market is there (any you just need to look at the huge amount of people who spend fortunes on projector setups like they one I've described) then this could be start of the next revolution ;-). Posted by Afzal, Switzerland