Is white letterboxing smarter than black letterboxing today!

[DavePS3]

The original idea behind letterboxing was simply for wider screens like Cinerama but when transferred to video like on Laserdisc, it was meant to be anamorphic, meaning no info in the black bars at all but that wasn't attainable until a couple of years into DVD. The first couple of years, none of the letterboxed DVD's were anamorphic.

As it is, because no lines of resolution are supposed to be in the black areas, it does and has presented an issue with Plasma and OLED displays because of Image Retention or Burn-In. Some Plasmas gave you the option of switching to white or light gray bars to avoid all that but watching films with the white was really annoying to most, who had a more dimly lit room when watching.