But will either format offer the movie you're looking for?
Disney Online, best known for Toontown, a massively popular multiplayer Internet game for children, has begun a US$50-a-year subscription service for the most discriminating of audiences: preschoolers.
The service, Playhouse Disney Preschool Time Online, marries Web features (for managing a child's progress and dispensing biweekly doses of learning games) with larger downloads of content that can reside on a hard drive, providing fast-playing games and TV-like animation.
After an 85-megabyte download from www.preschooltime.com, the program can be customized, with birthdays, favorite colors and so on, for up to five children. The service requires Internet Explorer, with firewalls either disabled or modified so that Disney's automated downloads can take place. Unfortunately, turning off firewalls can make a computer vulnerable to other programs, not so well intentioned.
The service was developed in consultation with the designers of classic software series like Reader Rabbit and the Living Books. It may help fill the need for high-quality, safe interactive media for young children. If it succeeds, others will certainly follow.
Wide-screen films are formatted for screens whose width is 2.35 times their height. When these films are projected on screens in other formats, the top and bottom of the image are sand-wiched between horizontal black bars, and sharpness suffers because not all the projector's pixels contribute to the picture.
Some projectors can squeeze wide-screen video so it fills the projector's frame and uses all available pixels, making the image brighter and sharper. This is done by projecting the image through an anamorphic lens, which stretches the image to its full width again. Because all the projector's light is used, the image it produces is both brighter and sharper.
But unless the projection screen is curved, anamorphic lenses bend lines that should be straight. So Stewart Filmscreen's CineCurve screen for high-end home theaters is curved. The screen is available in widths up to 3.4m, at about US$15,000 and the cost of installation.
The screen's curvature concentrates light toward the audience, minimizing distracting reflections on the room's side walls. Some viewers also feel more immersed in images that wrap around them. But not all films use the 2.35:1 format -- old movies and TV shows, for instance, have squarer, 4:3 proportions. For video in other formats -- old movies and TV shows, for instance -- masking panels move in from both sides to cover the screen's unused area.
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