Page 1 of Paying more for widescreen!!!

Just been on the UK HMV site and it says that Harry Potter is out on DVD 11th May. Fair enough, I`m not gonna add it to my collection but I`m sure many people will, but it says

Harry Potter & The Philosophers Stone- Widescreen
DVD £21.99
Harry Potter & The Philosophers Stone- Fullscreen
DVD £19.99

So now are we going to be forced to pay extra to watch the film how the director wanted it to be seen!
If people don`t mind loosing a huge chunk of the image then why don`t they just stick to VHS and leave DVD to people who truly care about films.

Rant over!

I second that opinion/rant.

How come it costs more to produce the Widescreen version? Or is it just a punitive pricing policy? Morons who think widescreen TV`s are real tellys with the top & bottom cut off - pay attention next time you`re in the cinema.

something to do with anamorphic widescreen?

If anything I would say a Pan & Scan would cost more to produce because somebody has to sit through the film and decide where to put the 4:3 frame. An anamorphic transfer is just directly encoded 4:3 (tall thin people) from the source. So when it is played on a widescreen or letterboxed TV it is forced back to 16:9 and so is higher quality than a straight 16:9 encode.

There is a great article on www.dvdfile.com about pan & scan dvd`s.

This item was edited on Tuesday, 19th February 2002, 12:40

I thought both P/S and W/S have an RRP of £22.99 in the UK
Probably HMV know those of us who buy W/S will shop around buy online or elsewhere so why give a good price. The masses who don`t know better will buy the P/S if they think it is a reasonable price. HMW did the same for videos discount the P/S and not the W/S probably also get bigger bulk discounts as will buy in a lot more P/S

The same thing was always the case with widescreen versions of VHS. The w/s version of the Star Wars trilogy cost a fiver more than the pan and scan, and most films were £1-2 more expensive than their p/s equivalents.