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Viz did it again! Saikano's 16:9.

There's a slight difference between Letterbox widescreen, and Anamorphic widescreen. Series such as New Fist of the North Star and Saikano have Letterbox, in where the black bars are encoded as part of the video, so you'd still get those black bars on playback on a widescreen TV, or even if you've set your DVD player to play things back at fullscreen.

Anamoprhic Widescreen is the name given to video that is meant for playback on widescreen TV> On a normal TV, the picture will be streched from top to bottom, but you can choose to squish it to it's original aspect ratio by having black bars added to the top and bottom.

Anyway, I think that this should be a standard for just about everything these days. It certianly has it's benefits (more video, duh) and well... shouldn't cost that much more to utilize over normal standard 4:3 ratio things.

Although I found it slightly annoying to see the Saikano tv series with black bars on all four sides I found it unexcusable that the newly released OAV also shares this problem. Why did Viz do this? I agree that "this should be standard for just about everything these days." Do they lack the technology to present a 16:9 image on my 16:9 screen or does it cost more to do? Are there any other titles that have this problem and are 4:3 letterboxed as opposed to 16:9 anamorphic, so I could avoid buying them? I find the whole situation rather inexcusable.

but the picture is clear.

joel_s95387 wrote:

but the picture is clear.

It really isn't. Things you'd normally wouldn't notice, such as edge enchangement or pixelization or whatnot are somewhat magnified.

Doesn't that depend on the quality of the TV? I know my laptop does a pretty good job and maybe you can notice the slight pixelizations if you sit hella close to the TV.

I guess in the end, your personal preference dictates what is and isn't good for you, but making matted releases doesn't please anyone.