@WaybackRewind - The LaserDisc took too long to come to market and was overshadowed by VCRs, and under supported by the motion picture industry, but persisted for decades as a niche product until it was replaced by DVD. The quality and features were unsurpassed for their time. The format finally came into its own in the mid 90s just as DVD came to market. Today they are mostly just a collector's item. #laserdisc #video #dvd #movie #sony #universal #supremecourt

To everyone about my comment on cropping...
I meant there is only so much vertical resolution in the recording format which is 4:3 by definition and letterboxing uses less of it so the resultant image has less resolution than it would as full 4:3 frame. In that sense the recording is "cropped", not the original image itself. In order to display the full image on my 16:9 TV I had to crop off the black bars, otherwise there would be bars on the left and right and top and bottom. Maybe I didn't use the right terminology to express that thought.

Also movies are typically shot in anamorphic wide screen or 2.35 to 1. If you do the math 16:9 is only 1.78 to 1, so even a modern widescreen version does not show the movie the way the director intended. To see it properly you need a very deep letterbox, which most people would find unacceptable, (except for the absolute purists).

From what I understand there was a true widescreen LaserDisc format that put a squeezed anamorphic image onto the full frame and then the player would unsqueeze it for playback. These are extremely rare though.