The horizontal masks of screen system have now been driven to 16:9 position, and the movie in a 2.40:1 aspect ratio would look like this. A native 16:9 projector produces gray bars on top and bottom of the picture, when the aspect ratio is wider than its native resolution. Thus, for movies in a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, as much as 35 % of the image’s vertical resolution is lost since the pixels in those areas are displaying black. In 4K panel this means almost 2 millions wasted pixels.

In order to restore the resolution and the extra brightness it offers, the picture can be expanded vertically so that every pixel on a 16:9 panel becomes active. This picture processing can be done electrically with an AV equipment, but as a result the picture geometry becomes distorted, and now everything in the picture is too tall and thin.

Now the anamorphic lens has been placed in front of the projector, and the mask drapes of the screen have been driven to the full open position. The lens optically restores the original picture geometry by expanding the picture horizontally. It results not only a much bigger picture, but it now also feels like watching a film, not a video. Shouldn’t you too be watching the movies in the original 2.40:1 Cinemascope format the way the directors recommend, just like in real commercial movie theaters.