The letterbox format, which is also used for some videocassettes, is designed to let the viewer see the entire wide-screen image as it was originally presented in the theater.

The goal of high-definition television, or HDTV, is to offer wide-screen images as crisp as film, with sound as clear as that on compact disks.

Its outstanding feature is the soft-edged, black-and-white wide-screen images contributed by Yuichi Nagata.

But that's exactly what develops in a funny, romantic film filled with cozy intimacies and lovely, wide-screen images of the French countryside.

Under the television industry's definition of HDTV, a set must be able to display a wide-screen 1,080-line image.

For many people, it will cost even more after they experience the superior picture quality, Dolby Digital surround sound and wide-screen image.

Digital TV would offer extraordinarily sharp wide-screen images with surround sound and would allow for additional channels and other enhanced services.

On the disc the wide-screen image comes close to the film's original 2:76-to-1 aspect ratio, almost three times as wide as it is high.

But the model stations find that the wide-screen images can have benefits, too.

"And we built a panoramic set" for the new wide-screen images.