In this debate about letterboxing, little has been said about the issue of
resolution; while video is of course much resolution whether letterboxed or
not, letterboxing (and I usually prefer it) can be quite a bit lower
resolution than pan-n-scan.  So it becomes a trade-off between composition
versus resolution; do you want your lost detail to be removed from the ends
of image, or uniformly from the entire image?  And then there's the issue of
color resolution; the delicate cinematography in Tarkovsky's films, for
example, become rather murky on video.  And there's plenty of other examples
in which resolution makes a big difference.

MJPW

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