Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> But my question would have to be... what the hell is so great about
> >> "widescreen" anyway?? Why is it that today everything must be
> >> widescreen? (Except for 99% of all the video you might want to
> >> watch...) Even my friggin' *laptop* is widescreen. WTF?
> >
> > Movies. Movies have been widescreen forever. People want to watch the
> > movie "unaltered" at home. That's why.
>
> Really? I hadn't noticed that one.

I'll let you off if you claim you only ever watched movies on TV, where they've
been cropped for decades (until fairly recently) ;-)

> Is there a reason why movies are filmed this way?

The view around you is rarely interesting when looking up and down, but much
more so on the horizontal, especially with a wide field of view. Also, when
people are conversing, moving, fighting etc, they're separated on the
horizontal, not the vertical, so a wide screen lets you show more of the scene
at once... It really all comes down to the fact that we've evolved to live on a
flat 2d surface, our eyes are placed to pan on the horizontal, etc etc.

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