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SubscribeThere seems to be an endless supply of aspect ratios in the display world, with more announced every year. It is important for consumers to understand the intended purposes of the various aspect ratios and why having this knowledge can make all the difference when it comes to selecting a projector and screen combination, as well as how the content you intend to watch will be presented.
For the sake of this discussion, it is important that we understand the difference between aspect ratio and resolution or frame size. Aspect ratio is the width of an image divided by its height. The resulting figure will be the decimal representation of the aspect ratio, but you can also see it as whole numbers, separated by a colon. Aspect ratio is closely tied to resolution. For instance, a 1080P signal will always be 16:9 or 1.78:1 because it's part of the 1080P HD standard.
Resolution refers to the actual pixels that make up an image, both in width and height and the total number of pixels that make up the image. 1080P, for example, is verbal shorthand for 1920x1080 in progressive (compared to interlaced).
Filmmakers, game developers, and video producers often utilize various aspect ratios in their work. For example, many role-playing games (RPGs) produce gameplay in a certain aspect ratio while their expositional parts of the story, often called cinematics, will employ one of the wider aspect ratios to help "sell" the cinematic look and feel of these pieces of the game.
Several films throughout cinema history have utilized various aspect ratios to help differentiate between flashbacks, present-day scenes, dreams, time periods, and more. We are conditioned, subconsciously, to perceive wider aspect ratios as more cinematic, whereas more square aspect ratios are often associated with computer games or television.
However, this has been changing over the last decade as computer graphics cards are able to handle higher resolutions and more data. Game developers have been providing wider and wider aspect ratios, and display manufacturers have been responding, including a super-wide 21:9 aspect ratio discussed below.
What follows is a breakdown of the most popular and newest aspect ratios you will find, what each is intended for, and how that might impact your setup.
16:9/1.78:1 Widescreen
Arguably the most ubiquitous aspect ratio currently around, it defines the native aspect ratio of 1080P HD, and 4K UHD (sometimes called 2160P) with its 3840x2160 resolution.. It is what I would call the de facto standard aspect ratio of most current flat panel televisions and many projectors.
You may remember when high definition first came out; widespread adoption took some time. Those watching on older standard definition televisions or projectors would get "letterboxed" images from HD content. Or when watching a movie on OTA (over-the-air) broadcast channels, you would get the disclaimer at the beginning indicating "this film has been formatted to fit this screen." It meant the original aspect ratio of the film, often a fairly wide aspect ratio, required the need to take the center part of the image and either "cut off" the sides of the frame to fit the more square aspect ratio of older displays or include the entire frame but have black bars on the top and bottom of the image (called letterboxing).
An interesting note is that 1.78:1 is the mathematical center point between 1.33:1 and 2.35:1, and this is largely considered to be why 16:9 was chosen as the aspect ratio for HD displays!
16:10 WUXGA
An acronym for Wide Ultra Extended Graphics Array, this is currently the most common aspect ratio in modern commercial projectors. With its 1920x1200 pixel count, t a WUXGA projector serves both the WUXGA and 1080p resolutions and aspect ratios by down-scaling 1080P imagery to fit the 1.78:1 aspect ratio.
WUXGA follows in the pantheon of VGA, SVGA, XGA, and myriad other resolutions, all with their own specific aspect ratios and designed for either mass adoption or specific purposes. Even today, new resolutions are being added to benefit from innovations in graphics technology.
1:1 Social Media
Built specifically for social platforms such as Meta, Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram, this aspect ratio is not going to be beneficial for most projector needs unless you intend to watch reels and shorts on your projector all day. Generally, a 1:1 aspect ratio video will be played overlaid on top of a blurred-out, cropped-in version of the video to fill a 16:9 or widescreen display. It's a fairly elegant solution for what otherwise would be pillar-boxed content (black bars on the left and right of the video).
4:3/1.33:1 Standard Definition
Speaking of pillar-boxing, you have probably seen lower resolution footage or films being shown on a widescreen display with black bars left and right of the image. This is because in standard definition days, the 4:3 or 1.33:1 aspect ratio was prevalent. Televisions, projectors, computer monitors, and even most Jumbotron-style displays were all roughly square.
While very close to the 1:1 social media standard, the 4:3 standard was slightly wider than tall and has been around since the late 1800s or early 1900s, depending on which version of the inception you choose to believe. One story claims that in 1892, William Dickson, an employee of Thomas Edison, named the aspect ratio based on the physical size of 35mm film stock. However, another story suggests it is named after the number of "perfs" the image took vertically, perfs being the perforations in the film stock on either side of the image, but this would indicate that the 4 refers to the image height, so who knows?
While most filmmakers have moved on to the more popular widescreen aspect ratios listed below, forcing the image into a 4:3 aspect ratio could lend itself to some creative restrictions and/or liberties for cinematographers.
9:16/0.56:1 Mobile Phone/Tablet Social Media
The various makes and models of smartphones and tablets presented a problem for display and graphics card manufacturers. Without the physical real estate or power availability of a desktop or even laptop computer, how could they support so many different resolutions and aspect ratios? A standard was created largely based on the existing 16:9 standard that allows for these devices to be rotated into landscape orientation, and widescreen content can be letter-boxed or pillar-boxed as needed.
Thus, the 9:16 aspect ratio was born. Given that smartphones and tablets can change orientation between portrait and landscape, the vertical version of widescreen would be the numerical opposite of widescreen.
1.85:1 VistaVision
One of the more interesting aspect ratios in terms of backstory, filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s discovered that if they changed the orientation of their lenses to the film, they could show their films "sideways" and gain more width in their images than shooting with the standard 1.37:1 "Academy Ratio" dictated by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts in the 1930s. This change from 4:3 as the film standard was to ensure audio could be recorded alongside the 35mm image on the actual celluloid film and thus required its own physical footprint, squeezing the width of the 4:3 image a bit.
Beloved of Alfred Hitchcock, VistaVision was pioneering in its day in that it allowed filmmakers the ability to utilize the film stock they had available while still capturing wider imagery that lent itself to landscapes and a more immersive experience.
21:9/2.33:1 Ultra-Wide Screen
Used in cinema and gaming to provide a more immersive experience, particularly as curved displays become more common, this ultra-wide aspect ratio has also now become quite popular in the video conferencing realm. Widescreen conferencing formats like Microsoft Teams Front Row and similar alternatives allow more on-screen real estate to show images of a larger number of participants along with presentation content.
Consequently, commercial projector manufacturers have started to target this market, and the 21:9 aspect ratio is appearing in more of their products over the last couple of years, or even being retrofitted to existing projector models with firmware updates,
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2.35:1 Cinemascope
This aspect ratio is a child of the "who can create the widest image possible" game played by filmmakers in the 1950s. It even helped give birth to the term "anamorphic," where lenses intentionally "squeezed" the image horizontally to fit into a standard 35mm frame. Then, the projector in the theaters were outfitted with lenses that reverse this effect to display the image naturally, the way it was shot.
This can have impacts on things like lens flares, most notably in J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" reboot film, which garnered no shortage of critiques for the director. Lens flares are flattened and horizontally elongated, producing a unique and creative look on screen.
2.39:1 Anamorphic
Another aspect ratio in the filmmaker's toolbox, the wider frame allows cinematographers to capture dramatic landscapes or fit wide groups of people into their scenes, and allows directors to employ unique blocking and framing.
While it's not a common aspect ratio, it has been used in notable films such as The Lost City of Z, The Accountant, Murder on the Orient Express (2017), most of the James Bond films, and nearly 1,500 other films.
2.76:1 Immersive Cinema
You may notice that this is a much wider image than those listed thus far, which is why it plays so well in IMAX theaters, though IMAX is generally "limited" to 1.43:1 aspect ratio imagery. Filmmakers will use this aspect ratio to ensure that their film can only be "truly and fully" appreciated in a theater, with their massive screens and ability to mask the screen to create virtually any aspect ratio they need to. It's not as common as the aforementioned aspect ratios, though there is a fairly healthy list of well-known films, such as The Hateful Eight, Ben-Hur (1959), Oppenheimer, and Battle of the Bulge.
Originally created by combining 70mm film with anamorphic lenses, the resulting super-wide image allows for unique framing and amazing landscape and scenic imagery but does limit the filmmaker when it comes to their characters and faces, in particular.
DCI 4K and Variants
While the full DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative) 4K image measures 4096x2160 (often referred to as 2160p) and boasts an aspect ratio of 1.90:1, there are at least three other variants worth mentioning.
DCI 4K Cinemascope cropped has been briefly mentioned above in the 2.39:1 Anamorphic section. While the advent of digital cinema has largely done away with anamorphic lenses, the terms "flat" and "scope" continue to persist. Flat refers to standard image capture and projection through spherical lenses, while scope refers to image capture and projection through anamorphic lenses. DCI 4K flat cropped therefore is slightly narrower, but taller than DCI 4K Cinemascope cropped, with a 3996x2160 resolution.
WQUXGA, or Wide Quad Ultra XGA, measures 3840x2400 and represents 4 times the pixels of the WUXGA (1920x1200) standard. This standard can sometimes be referred to as "UHD+" and represents the 16:10 version of DCI 4K. Introduced back in 2001, it is just now starting to gain popularity as a close cousin of DCI 4K and is enjoying new life with displays and graphics processors able to display it.
Conclusion
It is important to recognize that most projectors that can support 4:3 and 16:9 will be able to display the vast majority of these aspect ratios, especially the wider, cinematic options. However, how those aspect ratios are displayed to fit into a 16:9 image will lead to letterboxing, which reduces the overall vertical height of your images.
If you are putting together a home theater, this could affect the size of the screen you choose to install, as you want your vertical image height to be large enough that you don't feel you are compromising your viewing enjoyment simply because the filmmakers chose a wider aspect ratio.
What you are projecting in terms of moving or static imagery or text is also important. If you are primarily in a conference room or giving presentations with a slide deck, being able to make two versions of your presentation for both 4:3 and 16:9 could be beneficial in terms of font size, image size, and formatting of slides for the various aspect ratios and display sizes you may encounter.
Properly formatting your slides is important because many recent projectors that still support the 4:3 aspect ratio force imagery into this square format, either by squeezing a widescreen image horizontally or cutting off the sides and only showing the center part of the image. It is much better for everyone if you can present a native 4:3 presentation, if necessary.
If you intend to primarily use your projector for connecting to a computer for 1080P, 2160P, or 4K content, you will want to find the highest resolution projector you can afford as this will likely support every aspect ratio and resolution you want or need. Just remember that it can be difficult to find a projector with super low latency as well, so bear that in mind! You may have to sacrifice higher resolution capability to achieve low latency imagery.
Ultimately, you don't necessarily need to worry too much about your projector not supporting a specific aspect ratio as it can be made to fit into a resolution and aspect ratio that the projector supports. Just understand that it may not look the way it was intended to look and that there are secondary and tertiary considerations to think about outside of just resolution and aspect ratio support.
One critically important part of those considerations is your screen and the aspect ratio you will choose for it. Sure, there are masking systems that can change aspect ratio based on the content being displayed, but these systems are quite expensive and not practical for most users so it's important to know what content you will be watching and what the most common aspect ratios are going to be for that content. This can go a long way in helping you choose a screen.
The truth is that the vast majority of users will be able to enjoy their favorite movies, games, and pictures with most of the projectors on the market today, but that doesn't mean a projection system is plug-and-play. there are still many factors to research and educate yourself on before simply going out and buying a projector and screen only to find that it doesn't perform the way you want it to.
Tim Adams is president and chief systems designer for Timato Systems, an audio/video integration company specializing in servicing the sound, lighting, video, projection and live-streaming needs of churches and other houses of worship. He can be reached at info@timatosystems.com.
