Q: What's anamorphic?

Today you'll often see "anamorphic" used when describing the technology that enables superwide CinemaScope pictures to be viewed on a widescreen. An anamorphic DVD-often labeled as "enhanced for widescreen" or "enhanced for 16:9"-allows for the image to be stretched to fill more of the screen, so you have less of the black bars (called letterboxing).

An anamorphic lens attached to a higher-end front projector works in a similar way. First, the image is scaled to fill the full height of the screen so that everyone would be appear unnaturally tall and skinny. Then the anamorphic lens stretches the picture horizontally to fill the width of the screen, and everyone looks normal. The result is a big, wide picture with no more black bars. This also requires a special screen that's wide enough for the image. Such screens are often curved to reduce the loss of light reflecting from the screen.

A superwide CinemaScope image is displayed on a widescreen TV without anamorphic enhancement, leaving black and gray bars.

An anamorphic image is squished onto the DVD to fit in a 4:3 image.

Then stretched by the widescreen TV to fill most of the space.