I don't want to lose 1/4 of the picture just so it'll fit neatly on my screen without black bars. The worst is when the first HD release of a program mastered on film is in 16:9, so we never get the full picture in HD and have to choose between higher resolution and seeing the whole damn picture
Why is it 2.35:1 and not integers? Like that's close enough to 7:3 might as well set it arbitrarily in a way that looks nice.
It comes from taking the dimensions of a 35mm film, subtracting room for the perforations and the audio track, multiplying by 2 for the anamorphic lens, adding more clearance on the sides for flare, a margin for cutting and splicing, and so on. The actual ratio is 1678:715.
Very cool! Thanks for going so in depth.