Yup, if it's a non-anamorphic transfer, the black bars are burned in with the picture when the film is encoded, so to watch the non-anamorphic widescreen film on a 16x9 TV, you'll either need to have black bars on both the sides and top/bottom of the screen, using a small area of your tv screen; or use the zoom feature, compromising picture quality.
The second part of your response was actually my question, as well. 16x9
is 1.78:1. Whether the director intended the film to be 1.66:1, 1.78:1 or 1.85:1, the anamorphic transfer shows up without black bars on my 16x9 TV screens. So I'm wondering how this is possible. Logically speaking, the 1.85:1 should have very slight black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, while the 1.66:1 should have very slight bars on both sides. Are the images slightly stretched to fit the screen accordingly, or is some of the edge picture not visible on the screen?
I kind of understand what pchin's saying, though. But I'm not too much of a techie, so I'll need to look up what "overscan area" actually means... I think it means "some of the edge picture really can't be seen on the screen, anyway" but that's a guess based on what the term "overscan area" sounds like...