Fun fact: it had a special "anamorphic" mode. You know how widescreen movies on 4:3 displays are cropped? Someone had the idea that maybe instead of cropping them, you could use all of the resolution must just direct the electron beam to display it on middle 3/4 (vertically) of the screen. There, an extra 33% better vertical resolution and brightness for free?
There weren't a whole lot of DVDs mastered that way, but when you could get one, and your DVD player supported it, and your TV supported it, it looked freaking fantastic.
That’s actually not true, the majority of widescreen DVDs were mastered in Anamorphic format. The players themselves were then responsible for squishing down to letterboxed or doing an automated form of “pan and scan” which most people thought was terrible. If you were lucky though, you had a TV capable of doing the anamorphic adjustment and then you’d get the higher resolution as you stated.
Fun fact: it had a special "anamorphic" mode. You know how widescreen movies on 4:3 displays are cropped? Someone had the idea that maybe instead of cropping them, you could use all of the resolution must just direct the electron beam to display it on middle 3/4 (vertically) of the screen. There, an extra 33% better vertical resolution and brightness for free?
There weren't a whole lot of DVDs mastered that way, but when you could get one, and your DVD player supported it, and your TV supported it, it looked freaking fantastic.