From what I can tell, it's still showing the same amount of information, just bigger/taller, right?
I assume that you're looking at the raw output of the player.
CinemaScape Letterbox displays the UI and all content constrained within a 2.37:1 letterboxed area, vertically centered on the screen. (This is 1620 vertical pixels for 4K content.) It's intended for use with systems where the projector is being zoomed so that that letterboxed area fills the 'Scope-aspect screen. If you were to use this mode with an anamorphic lens, then your projector or video processor would have to stretch the image vertically by a factor of 1.33, and then your anamorphic lens would stretch that image horizontally by a factor of 1.33 to fill the screen.
CinemaScape Anamorphic displays the UI and all content within the full video frame of the player (2160 vertical pixels), and then the anamorphic lens stretches horizontally by 1.33 to fill the width of the screen. There is no vertical stretching within the projector or video processor. The Kaleidescape player does vertical stretch
only if necessary.
In practical terms, content that is natively 2.35/2.37/2.40 will look basically the same through both of these paths. It was originally 1620 vertical pixels and 3840 horizontal pixels of real resolution, and it still is once you blow it up. The only difference is who is doing the vertical stretch.
But, the onscreen display has the full 2160 pixels of vertical resolution (and 3840 of horizontal). It doesn't have to get squashed down vertically only to have the projector or processor try to stretch it right back out again. Content in taller aspect ratios like 1.85 or 1.78 also retain their full vertical resolution.
This is somewhat hard to talk about without drawing a lot of pictures. I hope it makes some sense. You can see our
CinemaScape white paper for more detail. Although it was written before Strato, the fundamentals are still correct.