11-02-2004, 03:49 PM
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Thoughts Media Review Team
Join Date: Aug 2006
Posts: 599
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The bottom line here is that without moving to High Definition, widescreen is a fudge. In order to achieve compatibility with 100% TV sets, widescreen images have to be horizontally stretched from the traditional 4:3 ratio.
So the question, really, is how best to get the squashed version.
The early camcorders did this by masking off bits from the top & bottom so that the viewfinder shows you what the widescreen image will look like. This is the cheapest solution but you are now losing quality in both directions - the image will get stretched vertically AND horizontally.
As Montego has pointed out, Century Optics do an anamorphic adapter. What this does is optically compress the image horizontally so that the full CCD is used to record the image. The downside is that the image in your camcorder's viewfinder will look squashed - it is probably something you get used to :-)
Prosumer camcorders are now starting to get CCDs capable of handling 16:9 in native resolution. Sony, for example, have got a whole batch of them and the prices are pretty reasonable.
--Philip
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