Where does this come from, and can I check it?

Engineers picked a ratio roughly between old television and widescreen cinema. The figure is taken from BFI, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

Is this really a movies & tv fact?

Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.

What else can I read about it?

The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.

Mondo Knows Facts

16:9 was a compromise between film shapes

Engineers picked a ratio roughly between old television and widescreen cinema The 16:9 shape is close to the geometric mean of the old 4:3 television frame and a 2.35:1 widescreen film. That made it a workable middle ground: a 4:3 picture fits with side panels and a scope film with thin bars. Standards bodies adopted it in the early 1980s. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.

Where this comes from

BFI

Facts that can change over time are reviewed and updated. If something here looks wrong, Mondo would rather know than be confidently incorrect.

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Technology trivia

More facts like this

Letterboxing kept the wide shape on square setsBlack bars above and below let a widescreen film fit an older television The Academy ratio ruled screens until the 1950sA frame of about 1.37 to 1 was the standard shape of cinema for two decades Super 35 crops the picture for widescreenThe negative is exposed full height and masked to a wide shape later The American TV standard used 525 linesNTSC ran 30 frames a second, split into two interlaced fields Europe chose 625 lines and 25 framesThe European PAL system traded frame rate for sharper picture detail France developed its own colour TV systemSECAM encoded colour in a different way from the rival TV systems

Tags: aspect-ratio, television, standards

16:9 was a compromise between film shapes: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Engineers picked a ratio roughly between old television and widescreen cinema. The figure is taken from BFI, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a movies & tv fact?: Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.