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Let’s go back to 1984, and not in an Orwellian way. In this year, Kerns H. Powers of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) calculated a happy medium of all the commonly-used aspect ratios of the time. That goes from the 2.35:1 ratio used in cinemas for widescreen films to the 4:3 ratio used by CRT TVs of the day, along with everything in between. Powers’ proposal was that the rectangles made up by all the many aspect ratios used at the time could fit inside a 16:9 (or 1.77:1, more precisely) rectangle, with 1.77 also being the geometric mean of the two ratios at opposi