One of the biggest draws for widescreen HDTVs is that we can now watch widescreen content without those black letterboxing bars on the top and bottom of the screen. Watching widescreen TV and some movies looks great. But what about those other movies, the ones that are super-wide, that still display with black bars even on your expensive new set? Philips is coming out with a TV in a 21:9 aspect ratio, instead of the 16:9 we're used to, that should finally be able to display that kind of content full-screen.

The culprit here is the popular 2.35:1 aspect ratio used by the CinemaScope process for projecting theatrical films. If you take a look at the films out on DVD listed in the Internet Movie Database, you can see that a huge number are in the 2.35:1 ratio. For comparison, the 1.85:1 and 1.78:1 films are much closer to the shape of a standard HDTV.

Philips' Cinema 21:9 TV is technically in a ratio of 2.33:1, so you'll still have tiny letterboxing bars when viewing proper 2.35:1 content, but it should be a huge improvement over the black bars you get with existing widescreen TVs.

This all sounds great if you're really into movies, but we've got to wonder if this will catch on with the general public. We still watch a lot of normal widescreen HD shows, and with the Cinema 21:9 set they'd display with black bars on the sides of the screen, like you get now when trying to watch old standard definition shows on a widescreen TV. They call this "pillarboxing", since it looks like your show is bordered by black pillars. If you can't stand those, you could zoom in to fill the screen, but then you'd miss the top and bottom edges.

So, before you race out to pick up the Philips Cinema 21:9 when it comes out this spring, think about what aspect ratio the most stuff you want to watch is in. If you're mainly into high definition TV, your 16:9 set is all that you really need. If your home theater is really just used for watching movies, and a lot of your favorites were shot with CinemaScope, then one of these super-widescreen sets might be just what you've been waiting for.

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