Ever wonder how to get rid of those black bars on top and bottom of your favouite blockbuster movie

The good news is you can as long as the’re willing to go for a front projection system with an Anamorphic Lens. To get everything to work just right, there are three essential elements to a widescreen anamorphic front projection setup. A projector with vertical stretching, an anamorphic lens & a 2:40:1 projectron screen.

This is what you would normally see when you are looking at a 2:35:1 movie on a 16:9 projector screen. Black bars at the top and bottom of the picture.

Fig 1  -  16:9 screen with a 2:35:1 movie

Now if you have a projector with a vertical stretch image processing function then you will get this.

Fig 2  -  16:9 screen with a 2:35:1 movie stretched vertically(everything is tall & skinny)

As you can see the image fills the enitre 16:9 screen but it is all distorted  making everything tall & skinny. Most of the new projectors on the market have this functionaility so you don't need an an external scalar as they can be expensive.  This processing stretches the source image vertically to fill the projector’s imaging chips, removing the black bars in the process

Then, a special anamorphic lens is placed directly in front of the projector’s lens opening, which provides the requisite horizontal stretch to restore the original image proportions.

The anamorphic lens is only used with widescreen movies, and is either manually or automatically moved away from the projector’s lens when not needed. (You only need the lens when watching 2.35:1 or 2:40:1 movies)

Finally, a suitably wide front projection 2:40:1 screen rounds out the required equipment, which all the major home theatre screen vendors offer. Simpler systems make do with a fixed-frame 2.40:1 screen, but that will leave visible screen area at the sides when watching 16:9 (1.78) programs, and substantial side bars with 4:3 content. Most offer more elegant automated solutions that 'mask' around to complement what you are watching

Fig 3  -  2:35:1 screen with a 2:35:1 movie vertially stretched with an anamorphic lens in front of the projection screen  

SI Screens have a cheaper option called the Black Diamond screen which is self masking. In other words any parts of the screen that are not bein used will look black. It's not quite as good as a fully masking system but will cost about 1/3 the price. (www.siscreens.com)

There’s another big bonus to going with a full anamorphic widescreen projection setup. When in anamorphic mode, all of the projector’s pixels are used to fill the screen image, which provides about a 30% brightness increase compared to what is achieved with a letterboxed "scope" movie on a standard 16:9 screen & a preceived better resolution.

And remember the movie in Fig 1will be about 77% bigger when using this particular setup as opposed to using a standard 16:9 screen like in Fig 1

Take a look at this link for a good explanation on how it all works

http://www.panamorph.com/index.htm