The Origins Of 4:3 Aspect Ratio And Economic Imperatives

by Warren Cordell
Tuesday, December 15, 1998

The origins of the 4:3 format is traceable to the early days of printing and engraving.

Whether producing a public announcement, a dictionary or a handbook, printers used the same size paper stock, roughly 24" x 17" to 26" x 19", (a broadsheet), and cut or folded the paper to the proper format. The number of pages printed per side were all powers of 2. To avoid binding and collating, newspapers were originally printed on one page in broadsheet format. Books were often printed first as folios, (two pages per broadsheet side), and then later reprinted in smaller type for the mass market, such as it was, as quartos, (four pages per broadsheet side), and octavos, (eight pages per broadsheet side).

To bind, folio broadsheets were simply folded and interleaved; quarto broadsheets were first cut in half perpendicular to the longest dimension; octavo broadsheets were cut in half along both dimensions. Consequently, printers quickly adopted a page aspect ratio of approximately 1.41 to 1, the square root of two. This minimized wasted paper and allowed printers to maintain the same aspect ratio across downsized reprintings for easier typesetting and proofing by apprentices.

The typical formats were therefore:

Broadsheet: 25" x 18" (H x W) Aspect ratio: 1.39
Folio: 12.5" x 18" (W x H) Aspect ratio: 1.44
Quarto: 12.5" x 9" (H x W) Aspect ratio: 1.39
Octavo: 6.25" x 9" (W x H) Aspect ratio: 1.44
16vo: 6.25" x 4.5" (H x W) Aspect ratio: 1.39

Illustrations were originally printed separately on unnumbered, heavier-stock pages and included only with higher-priced, illustrated versions of a publication. (Color illustrations were produced by a quasi assembly line paint-by-numbers approach employing child labor.) Early woodblock prints quickly gave way to more durable engraving. This process transferred line art via a stencil and scribe onto thin sheets of copper or tin. Chemical etching, using resists and acid baths, produced more durable plates faster and, hence, supplanted all other methods.

Although at odds with recorded history, I suspect that to further speed the process, engravers began experimenting with photosensitive resists in an effort to transfer the line art onto the resist using bright sunlight. Because a device known as a camera obscura, (essentially a box with a pinhole lens), was often used to trace a real-life image onto paper, it was therefore a short conceptual leap to replace the tracing paper with a photosensitive etching plate, thereby producing the earliest tintypes. Taking a historically more orthodox view, the aspect ratio of printing and engraving likely became the aspect ratio of photography when photographers began producing paper prints from glass negatives during the 1860ís. Whatever the case, the paper or tin link between the standard aspect ratio of printing and photography appears incontrovertible.

Amazingly, printing ís 1.4:1 legacy remained largely unchanged even as photography evolved from still to moving pictures, and ultimately television. Ironically, Hollywood fully adopted wider aspect ratios such as Cinemascope and Panavision only as a competitive response to television's incursions on its movie audiences. Despite the advent of wide-screen HDTV, the 1.4:1 legacy will likely live on for decades aided by the Internet and Hollywood's television and pre-1950s film libraries.

Underlying economic forces ultimately dictate whether a standard lives or dies. In many cases, a legacy standard—such as distance in miles or temperature in Fahrenheit—holds little economic significance and therefore survives despite government edict. Here, the economic return offered by the new standard cannot overcome the high cost of converting from the old standard or the difficulty of changing prevailing conventions.

In contrast, if a new standard can offer say a two year payback on the investment needed to convert from an old standard, that standard is quickly abandoned no matter its tenure. The widespread availability of relatively inexpensive, high-quality used cars from Japan ultimately converted Eastern Siberia to driving on the left-hand side of the road, in contrast to the rest of Russia.

That the U.S. standard railroad gauge matches the width of Roman chariots reflects the importance of economics rather than the persistence of legacy standards. Choosing a railroad gauge standard proved far messier and more contentious than generally belived. Railroads through mountainous areas preferred a narrower gauge which would minimize their construction costs. Railroads through the plains preferred a wider gauge, which would minimize operating costs via higher freight loads and train speeds.

In the end, the "legacy standard" of Roman chariots proved a convenient point of compromise. The economic benefits from a standard gauge with interline freight and passenger service eclipsed all other costs. Interestingly, the battle over a national railroad gauge standard went unresolved in another former British colony, Australia. The Western Australian Railroad between Adelaide and Perth uses a wider gauge than the more mountainous eastern coast of Australia where the bulk of the population resides. At Western Australian's junction with the east, the undercarriages and locomotives are laboriously swapped out to continue the journey of interline passengers and freight.

That incompatible standards persist here also reflects the underlying economics. The western Australian interior, the aptly-named Nullarbor Plain, is so desolate that the few towns there are served mainly by trucks and buses. Most freight between Australiaís east and west coasts travels by ship, an inherently far more economical mode of transport than rail.

Extrapolating to the DTV standards debates, one can make the following prediction: for better or for worse, de facto Wintel PC/TV "standards" (i.e. PC í99 and WebTV) will overwhelm any official DTV set-top standards defined by ATSC, DASE or the OpenCable initiative.

The current $1800 street price for a PC/TV equipped with a 200MHz MMX processor, a DVD-ROM, a V.90 modem and a 32" VGA monitor will likely fall to $1300, (~$550 for an upgraded system and ~$750 for the monitor), by early 1999. However, the classic x86/Win 95 platform will be supplanted shortly thereafter by the new StrongARM/Win CE PC/TV platform that will immediately reduce the system price, sans monitor, to under $400.

At this price point, the combination WebTV, DVD-ROM player, Internet-enabled DirectX game system and digital set-top box could motivate millions of otherwise wary consumers to buy into DTV despite the problems and confusion surrounding it. The ATSC standard set-top box will likely go the way of the NC computer.

Warren Cordell
Advanced Teleservices
[email protected]
(650) 493-0239