Has anyone seen a movie in anamorphic "standard"? I got the Warner Archive edition of The Story of Mankind and was rather surprised when, playing it on my standalone DVD player, I had to adjust the screen to the widescreen setting to get the correct 4x3 aspect ratio. If I put it on the standard setting, the picture got narrower than 4x3, with black bars of a couple different shades: one shade for those bars touching the picture, forming with it a real 4x3 rectangle, another shade further to the sides, filling the rest of the 16x9 player screen. Curious.

Fun picture, although I believe it did appear in one of those Medved bad-movie books. Love Warner Archive, even with an apparent snafu like this.

I imagine this is going to get more common as older 1.33 OAR films come to blu-ray.

I've seen it in some special features, mostly on Anchor Bay discs.
The different shades of bars are due to one being on the print on the disc (to fill the 1.78), the other your TV filling in what's left from the 1.78 image cropped to 1.33. Those blacks never seem to match.

Quoting bigdaddyhorse:

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I've seen it in some special features, mostly on Anchor Bay discs.
The different shades of bars are due to one being on the print on the disc (to fill the 1.78), the other your TV filling in what's left from the 1.78 image cropped to 1.33. Those blacks never seem to match.

Yes, definitely on many Anchor Bay DVD releases. I used to watch them on my old Sony WEGA Trinitron, and if the DVD/TV were both set in 16:9 mode, then those full-screen special features would appear "boxed" on all four sides and not squished at all. If I set the DVD/TV settings to standard Letterbox mode, they filled the full screen just fine when viewed.

Normally watching standard 4:3 material when the DVD/TV were both set to 16:9 would cause a noticeably squished/compressed image.

Quoting Voltaire53:

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Quoting Dr Pavlov:

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God I hope not, daddy. I would hope that hollywood learned ten years ago that OAR is the key. If the OAR is 4X3 so be it

AIUI it IS being left in 4x3, it's just that HD doesn't support 4x3 ratio so they have to fill in the pixels either side with 'bakck' bars to make the image 1.78:1 (or they have to stretch/crop it which I'm sure we all agree is worse)

Yeah, it's not really a bad thing for those of use with 16X9 sets, just saves us switching the viewing mode really as something has to make the square picture fit on the rectangle TV.

It makes sense to do this on Blu-ray, but on DVD, you're just wasting resolution and annoying people who don't have widescreen sets.