What is my camcorder's "letterbox" mode?

What is my camcorder's "letterbox" mode?

Tim Smith (Camcorder Training Specialist) gives expert video advice on: What does the "spotlight" function on my camcorder do?; Should I use my camcorder's "widescreen" mode?; Do consumer camcorders have slow-motion capabilities? and more...

We probably see this term a lot when we're renting films, maybe we rented the letterbox version of it. Essentially letterbox means that the image you're going to see is going to kind of look like it did when it was in a theater, the image is going to be wider than it is tall. With letterboxing typically you will always see these black bars at the top and bottom of your screen. Really what that is doing is allowing for the new aspect ratio, the 16 by 9 aspect ratio, to fill up your screen and give you that wide screen feeling. Now if you where watching something that was shot in 16 by 9 and you had a 16 by 9 television, or it was shot in a wide screen mode like that, you wouldn't see those bars anymore. It wouldn't be letterbox, it would be what is called a true 16 by 9 or true widescreen image.