New DVDs: ‘How the West Was Won’

The best reason for buying a Blu-ray player right now is Warner HomeVideo's high-definition version of "How the West Was Won," a film made46 years ago in the highest-definition moving picture medium the worldhad seen: Cinerama. With its three strips of 35-millimeter filmprojected side by side with a slight overlap on a gigantic, curvedscreen, Cinerama offered six times the resolution — which is to say,six times as much visual information — of the standard film of 1952,when it was first used commercially.