Exploring the History of Witch Letterboxes

The witch letterbox is a mysterious and enchanting concept that has captured the imagination of many. This fictional creation revolves around a magical mailbox used by witches to send and receive letters. While traditional letterboxes are used to deliver mail, the witch letterbox serves a much different purpose altogether. The idea of the witch letterbox often emerges from folklore and fantasy stories where witches are depicted as powerful and supernatural beings with their own unique methods of communication. In these tales, the witch letterbox is described as a beautifully crafted box adorned with intricate and mystical symbols. These symbols are believed to be key in ensuring that messages are delivered to the intended recipients.

There's three ways to handle 16:9 content on a 16:10 screen:

- source video is 1280x720 16 9 aspect ratio - screen size is 1280x768 16 10 aspect ratio - image will be displayed as 1280x720 with black bars on top. Black bars get added -- to the sides or top and bottom of the screen -- so the TV show or movie can fit on your TV without bring cropped or stretched.

These symbols are believed to be key in ensuring that messages are delivered to the intended recipients. One fascinating aspect of the witch letterbox is that it is not limited by distance or location. Witches can use their magic to send letters to fellow witches or even to non-magical individuals, regardless of where they are located in the world.

Widescreen, letterbox and black bars: How to wrangle TV aspect ratios

What are those black bars on your screen when you watch a movie? Should you get rid of them? Can you? Behold, the world of aspect ratios, and how to deal with them.

Geoffrey Morrison is a writer/photographer about tech and travel for CNET, The New York Times, and other web and print publications. He's also the Editor-at-Large for The Wirecutter. He has written for Sound&Vision magazine, Home Theater magazine, and was the Editor-in-Chief of Home Entertainment magazine. He is NIST and ISF trained, and has a degree in Television/Radio from Ithaca College. His bestselling novel, Undersea, and its sequel, Undersea Atrophia, are available in paperback and digitally on Amazon. He spends most of the year as a digital nomad, living and working while traveling around the world. You can follow his travels at BaldNomad.com and on his YouTube channel.

Ever watch a movie, and get distracted by the black bars at the top and bottom of the screen? Ever wonder what they are, and why they're different sizes? Wasn't the switch to "widescreen" TVs supposed to prevent all this?

Well. yes and no.

The problem is there's still often a difference between how wide a TV show or movie is, and how wide your TV is. Black bars get added -- to the sides or top and bottom of the screen -- so the TV show or movie can fit on your TV without bring cropped or stretched. Some people find these bars distracting, but they're a good thing.

Wide, wider, widest

Note how much is lost when cropping the original image (bottom) to fit screens with a squarer aspect ratio.

"Aspect ratio" is the ratio of the width of a rectangle to its height.

A perfect square has an aspect ratio of 1x1, or 1:1. A rectangle that's twice as wide as it is tall would have an aspect ratio of 2x1, or 2:1.

Things start getting a little confusing when you have stranger ratios. For example, the old tube-style TVs were slightly wider than they were tall. They had an aspect ratio of 4x3, which could also be described as 1.33:1 (technically, 1.33333333333. 1 but let's not get too crazy).

If it's been a while since you've seen a tube TV (try a cheap hotel. ), another really common 4:3 device is the iPad.

Your HDTV is even wider. It has an aspect ratio of 16x9, or 1.78:1 (again, 1.7777. ). So for every 16 inches wide your TV screen is, it's 9 inches tall.

Old TV shows generally have an aspect ratio of 4x3. In order to fit them on your wider screen, 16x9 HDTV, something has to give. You can't fit a square peg in a rectangular hole, so to speak.

The easiest way is to put bars on the left and right. ESPN, for example, does this a lot with old footage, putting their logo on the right and left. Nightly news shows often show a blurred out version of the image on either side of the "real" image.

Another, less ideal, way is to crop and zoom on the image, removing the top and bottom, but fitting the image on the 16x9 screen. This often removes things like foreheads.

Another even less ideal way to do it is to stretch the image horizontally. This makes everyone look exceptionally fat.

A common way to show 4x3 content on a 16x9 screen.

If all you watched on your TV were current TV shows, with the occasional rerun of "Night Court" thrown in, you'd be all set. Old shows would have sidebars ("pillarboxing"), new shows would fill your TV.

The problem is movies. Hollywood has had many, many different aspect ratios over the years. These days the most common are 1.85:1, and 2.39:1. Depending on your favorite old movie, however, these could range from 1.37:1 ("Casablanca") all the way to 2.76:1 ("Ben-Hur," and more recently, "The Hateful Eight").

Most Blu-ray and streaming services show these movies in their original aspect ratio, with either thick black "letterbox" bars at the top and bottom of 2.39:1 aspect movies (2.40:1 as it's put on the Blu-ray):

A 2.40:1 image as shown on a 1.78:1 (16x9) HD/UHDTV. Bonus points if you can figure out what town this is in.

Or with small letterbox bars when showing a 1.85:1 movie (comedies, some smaller dramatic films):

A 1.85:1 aspect ratio image as shown on a 1.78:1 (16x9) HD/UHDTV.

So even though it seems like you're seeing less image, you're actually seeing the entire image. As in, everything the director intended you to see. Many directors use this format to its full advantage, putting important aspects of the story all over the screen, or setting up beautiful shots, all of which gets lost if the aspect ratio isn't correct.

And sometimes the same film will actually employ different aspect ratios, often for effect. "Oz the Great and Powerful" switched from black-and-white 4x3 to color 2.35:1 after the protagonist moved to Oz, for example, and "Life of Pi" was a 16x9 film that included two changes, once during the flying fish scene and another in homage to the cover of the book. And for some films presented in IMAX, like "The Dark Knight" and "Tron: Legacy," only certain portions were shot in the 1.44:1 IMAX format. Here's a great collection with plenty of other examples.

Cropping and stretching

All TVs come with aspect ratio controls to zoom or stretch the image so it fills the screen. Often they buttons are labeled "wide" or "format." These exist largely because people get upset that black bars cover the screen, thinking they weren't seeing "the whole image" (even though, as we've discussed, they were).

Would you like too know more?

• What is upconverting?
• Can 4K TVs make 'regular' HD content look better?
• Beyond basic TV settings
• What's the best picture mode?
• Overscan: You're not seeing the whole picture on your TV

Some people are so annoyed by the black bars that they use the aspect ratio controls on their TV to crop and zoom in on the image.

This is a bad idea, for several reasons. We'll skip the "director's intent" argument because in all my years talking about the benefits of the correct aspect ratio, pleading "this is what the director wanted!" has convinced exactly zero people.

Here's why: it makes your TV look worse. WAY worse.

It's that simple. Zooming in on an image makes it look worse, namely softer and fuzzier, despite what TV shows and movies lead you to believe about the "magic" of zooming on an image (Suuuuure you can read that license plate from a security camera a mile away in the dark).

For an example, let's take a 2.40:1 movie on Blu-ray. The image's resolution is 1,920 by 800 (1,920/2.4=800). That's 26 percent less resolution than a standard 16x9 HD image to start with, and you're only selecting part of it when you zoom/expand to fill the screen. You're essentially taking a 1,420x800 image (the 16x9 portion of the wider image), and blowing it up to fill a 1,920x1,080 screen. That's 45 percent less resolution that your TV has to create, often poorly.

Original (top) vs upconverted or "scaled" (bottom). Click for a larger image. I exaggerated it a bit so you could see the difference in lower resolution. This example image was created to show what Blu-ray looks like on 4K TVs, but the overall effect for cropping/zooming is similar (albeit less pronounced).

By zooming in on this lower resolution image, there can be multiple issues depending on your TV. As mentioned, it's always going to be softer than if you didn't zoom in. That's because no matter how good scaling has gotten, it still can't work magic and make lower resolution images look like HD.

The second is the likeliness of "jaggies" or jagged diagonal lines. For more on that, and more examples of the effects of zooming in on an image, check out What is upconverting? and Can 4K TVs make "regular" content look better.

4K, 21:9, 16x10 and more

So far we've covered what most of you have, namely a standard HDTV. Ultra HD "4K" displays are the same aspect ratio, and will have the same issues when you zoom in, only worse. Scaling a Blu-ray image to look good on a 4K TV is one thing, but scaling a lower resolution image gets progressively harder, and will look progressively worse.

The Vizio CinemaWide XVT3D0CM was a 21x9 TV.

Every few years we see a manufacturer tout a wide-aspect ratio TV. Philips has marketed a few, and the Vizio CinemaWide XVT3D0CM was the last we reviewed at CNET. These had screen in a 21x9, or 2.33:1 ratio (though many were 2560x1080 resolution, which is usually 2.37:1). Like 16x9 TVs, this matched exactly no movie aspect ratios. However, they were close, and also offered the ability to have a full 16x9 image and something else (like a Web page) on screen at the same time. Don't expect these to become mainstream.

Many computer monitors have a slightly taller aspect than TVs, with a 16:10 ratio.

Bottom line

Hey, it's your TV, enjoy. But for the best picture quality, leave it in the original aspect ratio. Make sure your DVD, Blu-ray, or cable box is set to output 16x9, and make sure your TV is set for "native," or something similar, in it's aspect ratio settings (it's usually the same control that helps you solve this problem).

The image may be smaller with letterbox bars, but by cropping and zooming, you'll lose detail and potentially miss out on what's on the sides of the image.

There is no end solution for this - either you have a little bit of black bars at the bottom or you have a bit of video cut out on the sides. The Lumia 920 does not have a 16:9 display hence why there are black bars; if you had an HTC 8X there wouldn't be any as it has a resolution of 1280x720 in 16:9 whereas the Lumia 920 has a resolution of 1280x768

This opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for communication and exchange of information between magical and non-magical realms. In some stories, the witch letterbox is said to possess the power of divination. Witches can write a letter, place it in the box, and through some unknown means, receive a response or guidance from higher powers or other witches. This adds an element of mystery and intrigue to the concept, as it suggests that the witch letterbox holds secrets and knowledge beyond the reach of regular mortal beings. While the witch letterbox is primarily associated with witches, it is not limited to their use alone. In some versions of the concept, other magical beings such as fairies or wizards also use these enchanted mailboxes for communication purposes. This further expands the possibilities and scope of the witch letterbox and adds richness to the fictional worlds in which it exists. The idea of the witch letterbox serves as a wonderful reminder of the power of imagination and the endless possibilities that can be found within folklore and fantasy literature. It sparks curiosity and wonder and invites us to explore the boundaries of our own creativity. So, the next time you come across a tale or a book mentioning the witch letterbox, let your imagination run wild and immerse yourself in the magical world it creates..

Reviews for "Witch Letterboxes: Tools of Communication or Objects of Power?"

1. John - 2 stars - I found "The Wutch" to be incredibly confusing and hard to follow. The plot jumped around too much and it was difficult to keep track of what was happening. The characters were also quite bland and uninteresting, making it hard to care about their fates. Overall, I was disappointed with this film and would not recommend it.

2. Sarah - 1 star - "The Wutch" was a complete waste of time. The storyline made no sense and the pacing was incredibly slow. I kept waiting for something exciting to happen, but it never did. The acting was also subpar, with the actors delivering their lines in a flat and uninspired manner. I regret watching this film and wish I had spent my time on something more enjoyable.

3. Mike - 2 stars - I was really disappointed by "The Wutch". The trailer had me intrigued, but the actual film fell flat. The story felt disjointed and the explanations for certain events were confusing and unsatisfying. The visual effects were also underwhelming and failed to add any excitement to the film. Overall, I found "The Wutch" to be a forgettable and lackluster viewing experience.

4. Emily - 1 star - I'm usually a fan of psychological thrillers, but "The Wutch" missed the mark completely. The plot was convoluted and filled with unnecessary twists that only served to confuse the viewer. The acting was also not up to par, with many of the performances feeling forced and unnatural. I had high hopes for this film, but unfortunately, it was a major letdown.

Witch Letterboxes: A Journey into the Occult