attend the theater rather than sit at home watching the TV. Because our two eyes give us a wider view, a wider movie makes more sense. Widescreen formats are formatted much closer to the way we see. Our field of vision is more rectangular than square. When we view mov- ies in widescreen format, the image fills more of our field of vision and has a stronger visual impact. Wider screens gave the theater audience a more visually engulfing experi- ence. The 16:9 aspect ratio allows TV to move closer to the movie experience. Besides being formatted for a wider screen, an HDTV picture has more detail and crisper images. With the bigger pictures comes a finer resolution. TV images are made up of pixels, each of which is a tiny sample of video information, one of the little squares that make up an overall picture. Each pixel is composed of three close dots of color: red, green, and blue. Combined on the phosphor screen, the three separate colors appear to blend into a single color. Each phosphor emits light in proportion to the intensity of the electron beam hitting it. On a standard TV screen, the electron beam has about 256 levels of intensity for each of the three col- ored phosphors. Therefore, each pixel has a spectral range of about 16.8 million colors. From a distance, each pixel ends up looking like a single dot of color, but up close, you can see that each pixel is really a rectangular trio of red, green, and blue; this is most visible on projection televisions, where the colors separate a little more. HDTV uses smaller pixels that are closer together, and they are square, just like on most computer monitors. Digital pixels are also smaller. HDTV has 4.5 pix- els in the area taken up by a single pixel on standard NTSC TVs. The more pixels in a given area, the more detailed and better the picture. A quick comparison will help you appreciate the vastly improved resolution offered by HDTV. The maxi- mum resolution of an NTSC TV is a display that is 720 pixels wide by 486 active lines, resulting in a total of 349,92