Electronic House has a really interesting article in their Cool Homes series about a couple who have gone all out to build their own CinemaScope home cinema.
They're completely hooked on the CinemaScope format (2.35:1) which even on a standard 16:9 widescreen TV or projector will result in black bars top and bottom.
Their setup instead uses a projector with an anamorphic lens that will project the full image without stretching or distorting it.
The Wessons have a three-chip Runco DLP projector, which uses Runco’s CineWide technology and its AutoScope anamorphic lens. The projector takes the 2.35:1 image, which would normally appear with the letterboxing on the top and the bottom, and stretches it to fill up the height of the screen. If it were left at that, though, the picture would be distorted, and everyone would be really tall and skinny. (Too bad diets aren’t that easy.)But before you ever see the world of unnaturally tall and skinny people, the anamorphic lens stretches the picture horizontally to fill the width of the screen so everyone looks normal. The result is a big, wide picture with no more nasty black bars.
And as we mentioned earlier, a screen wide enough to handle the 2.35:1 format is needed. Several screen manufacturers can accommodate this. The Wessons, for example, have a curved Stewart screen. Why curved, you ask? The Wessons’ home theater installer, Dennis Erskine, of Design Cinema Privee, explains that when selecting a CinemaScope projector, you have to be concerned with the throw distance, or the distance from the projector to the screen. “The shorter the throw distance, the greater the ‘pin-cushion effect,’ which is the top or bottom of the picture bowing out,” Erskine says. “So we calculate the curvature of the screen to eliminate that.”
And they'd never buy a DVD that was clipped to fit 4:3.
From: Sony to double BRAVIA LCD TV production for growing European demand