Widescreen

Widescreen images are a variety of aspect ratios used in film, television and computer screens. In film, a widescreen film is any film image with a width-to-height aspect ratio greater than the standard 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio provided by 35mm film.

For television, the original screen ratio for broadcasts was 4:3 (1.33:1). Between the 1990s and early 2000s (at a differing pace in Western nations), 16:9 (1.78:1) TV displays came into wide use. They are typically used in conjunction with high-definition television (HDTV) receivers, or Standard-Definition (SD) DVD players and other digital television sources.

With computer displays, aspect ratios wider than 4:3 are also called widescreen. Widescreen computer displays were previously of 16:10 aspect ratio, but now are usually 16:9.

Widescreen was first used in the film of the Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight in 1897. This was not only the longest film that had been released to date at 100 minutes, it was also the first widescreen film being shot on 63mm Eastman stock with five perforations per frame.

Widescreen was first widely used in the late 1920s in some short films and newsreels, including Abel Gance's film Napoleon (1927) with a final widescreen sequence in what Gance called Polyvision. Claude Autant-Lara released a film Pour construire un feu (To Build a Fire, 1928) in the early Henri Chretien widescreen process, later adapted by Twentieth Century-Fox for CinemaScope in 1952.

In 1927, The American aka The Flag Maker was released. The film, directed by J. Stuart Blackton and starring Bessie Love and Charles Ray, was made in the experimental widescreen process Natural Vision, developed by George K. Spoor and P. John Berggren, but was never released theatrically. In 1926, Spoor and Berggren had released a Natural Vision film of Niagara Falls. The Natural Vision widescreen process used 63.5mm film and had a 2:1 aspect ratio.

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