What the Heck Is Anamorphic?
article. There are excellent animated illustrations at DVD Web (requires Flash). More information can be found at the Anamorphic Widescreen Support Page. Anamorphosis causes no problems with line doublers and other video scalers, which simply duplicate the scan lines before they are stretched out by the widescreen display. For anamorphic video, the pixels are fatter. Different pixel aspect ratios (none of them square) are used for each aspect ratio and resolution. 720-pixel and 704-pixel sizes have the same aspect ratio because the first includes overscan. Note that “conventional” values of 1.0950 and 0.9157 are for height/width (and are tweaked to match scanning rates). The table below uses less-confusing width/height values (y/x * h/w). 720×480 720×576 704×480 704×576 352×480 352×576 4:3 0.909 1.091 1.818 2.182 16:9 1.212 1.455 2.424 2.
