Why does my ps3 blu-ray player on a 50"bravia 16X9 tv not fill the whole screen on a 16X9 movie in 1080p?

Question

Why does my ps3 blu-ray player on a 50"bravia 16X9 tv not fill the whole screen on a 16X9 movie in 1080p?

Answer 1

Because movies are shot in yet a different aspect ratio from that which your TV is.

Answer 2

What movie are you talking about here?

If the player and display are properly configured, then it may be the disc and, here's the thing, there would be nothing wrong in this case.

Some movies are done in a widescreen format that is simply wider than an HDTV screen, such as any film done in Panavision, Cinemascope, Todd-AO, Super35 with aspect ratios wider than 1.85:1, or various other widescreen processes (any Star Wars film, any Indiana Jones film, any Star Trek film, any spaghetti western from Sergio Leone's "man with no name" series, just about any John Carpenter film, Titanic, etc.).  This means that, if a Panavision film was transferred to video that preserves the aspect ratio, you will get letterboxing (black bars).

In addition, if you take a film that was done in the Academy format or most TV shows, you will have pillarboxing, or black bars on the sides.  Again, this is not a problem but just the way the picture was formatted.

Just don't worry about it.  If it's OAR (original aspect ratio), then you are watching the movie in the way that it was designed to be presented anyways.