AYRE DX-5DSD - Manual (Page 47)

money they would use an existing transfer that had
been made for the laser disc format. Since laser disc
had no provision for widescreen films, these
transfers were done in “letterboxed” format, where
the black bars at the top and bottom of the image
were added to the disc itself during the transfer
process.
These letterboxed discs will display properly on a
standard display. However, on a widescreen display
you will not only see black bars at the top and
bottom of the image from the letterboxing process
on the disc itself, but the display will add additional
black bars at the sides of the image to maintain the
correct picture geometry. The final result is a very
small picture centered on your screen.
Most widescreen displays and the Ayre DX-5 DSD
have a “zoom” mode (see page 55) that will expand
the image in all four directions to fill the screen.
However, the picture resolution suffers as many of
the available pixels on the disc have been discarded.
Fortunately as the market for video discs have
grown, these types of discs are now rarely seen.
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