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 ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu