Anamorphic DVD

[Coqrogue]

Will the effect of an anamorphic DVD (better quality) only apply to 16:9 television sets or does my standard 4:3 TV also benefit from it?
/Thx C

[manono]

Will the effect of an anamorphic DVD (better quality) only apply to 16:9 television sets or does my standard 4:3 TV also benefit from it?

Yours may benefit if a new better transfer was prepared for a 16:9 version of a movie, where before there was only an inferior widescreen 4:3 version available:
The bottom line is this - doing a new anamorphic transfer is almost always going to result in better quality, even if you still only have a Standard TV. The reason for this, is that today's telecine processes are fully digital. The state-of-the-art in film transfer technology is much better today than it was even a few years ago, especially with high-definition transfers being done more and more. When a studio simply re-uses an "off the shelf" laserdisc master (done even just a few years ago), you're going to see unnecessary edge-enhancement and all kinds of other NTSC and analog artifacts in the video. A new digital transfer will be clean and crisp, with vibrant and correctly timed color. It may even have been digitally cleaned, with little spots of print damage, hair and dust actually having been digitally erased from the image altogether.
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/page2.html

Otherwise there's not much benefit to those with 4:3 TV sets, but you'll definitely benefit when you buy your next (Hi-Def) TV set:
Anamorphic video as it appears on a Standard 4x3 TV. The DVD player performs a mathematical downconversion on the video signal, in effect combining every 4 lines of vertical resolution into 3 until the correct aspect ratio is achieved. The black bars at the top and bottom of the image are generated electronically, completing the image. Visually, it's nearly indistinguishable from a non-anamorphic (letterboxed) DVD image.
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/anamorphic185demo.html