User:Spblat/Letterbox Pillerbox Pet Peeve

I have a 1080p display. Its aspect ratio is 16:9. This commercial looks like 2.35:1.

File:Compounded letterboxing and pillarboxing.jpg

Somewhere between Honda's ad agency and me the image was pillerboxed from 16:9 to 4:3. Then the resulting 4:3 image was letterboxed down to 2:35:1. Of the roughly 2.1 million dots on my screen, only 42% of them were used to show me pictures of cars.

How much information was lost in pillarboxing to 4:3?

• A standard 1080p display is 1920 pixels wide by 1080 pixels high, a ratio of 16 to 9 (16:9).
• To get to 4:3 we keep the 1080 pixels height and look for the new width in pixels using the good old cross-multiply trick from high school and solve for the new width:

${x \over 1080}={4 \over 3}$

$x={4 \over 3}\cdot 1080=1440$

• Then our 1440x1080 image is letterboxed to 2:35:1. This image has a width of 1440. What's the height? Same process:

${1440 \over x}={2.35 \over 1}$

$x=1440\div 2.35\approx 613$

• My glorious 1920x1080 display is showing a 1440x613 picture of cars. How annoyed should I be? I shouldn't be annoyed at all. I shouldn't be doing this, I should be watching Lost or something. But I'm 42% annoyed:

<math>{{1440 \cdot 613} \over {1920 \cdot 1080}} = 42%