Widescreen/HDTV Aspect Ratios

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Mike Blakesley

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[Moderator: this topic was split off from another in the Alpert Forum.]


Well don't even get me started on TVs. 90% of the owners of HDTVs stretch
out the picture to fill all of the screen, regardless of whether the image is distorted or not...they think, "I paid for a 55 inch picture and dammit, I'm gonna watch a 55 inch picture." That's pretty much all you need to know about most people's standards.
 
Mike Blakesley said:
Well don't even get me started on TVs. 90% of the owners of HDTVs stretch out the picture to fill all of the screen, regardless of whether the image is distorted or not...they think, "I paid for a 55 inch picture and dammit, I'm gonna watch a 55 inch picture." That's pretty much all you need to know about most people's standards.

OMG! Someone else notices that, too!

Overseas military TV programming (AFRTS) still transmits in 4:3 but you can only buy wide screen TVs in the Exchange (the PX or BX). Even in the dining facilities, libraries and offices EVERYONE is watching crap stretched out and distorted.

And the worst setting is that odd one that keeps the middle 60% of the picture in 4:3 but takes the 20% on either side and stretches it to fill.

Then there's the idiots who keep it stretched out and then choose the "zoom" setting where they truly lose the outer edges AND get that disturbing distortion.

I just cringe when someone says, "looks like (name of TV personality here) has gained some weight!" or "I don't remember (name of actor) being that fat last time I saw this." I bite my tongue, because I want to say, "No, dumbsh!t -- you have the TV's settings wrong."

Of course, when I'm alone in a room I set it so I get the black on either side (unless it's a local Kuwaiti HD channel). It's a great show when some idiot comes in and asks me why I'm not watching it in wide screen. I often wish I had my demo DVD with the circle in the middle so I could show them the distortion...

--Mr Bill
if only those with IQs under 100 could be weeded out of society... Did I just say that? :D
 
Well say hello to an "idiot".

I own a Sony Bravia 40" HDTV. What none of you realize is they have made vast improvements to sizing the picture to fit. There are adjustments on this model that make faces and other items look pretty good on 4:3. TV is coming to all digital and HD. There is also no picture lost at the edges either. I see more edge area than I ever did the dinosaur analog TV's I owned. May as well not fight it and join the change. The days of the old "keyhole" TV screens is dying.
 
As someone who makes part of my living writing about HD, I can tell you aspect ratios continue to confound a lot of people. I don't get it--can't they tell when the AR is off? Evidently not. :wink: I got into a somewhat heated argument with my in-laws at their cabin last summer because my father-in-law kept switching the settings so that 4:3 was stretched to 16:9 because "that's what the DirecTV guy told me to do." Well, guess what, the DirecTV guy was wrong! :)
 
honda05 said:
Well say hello to an "idiot".

I own a Sony Bravia 40" HDTV. What none of you realize is they have made vast improvements to sizing the picture to fit. There are adjustments on this model that make faces and other items look pretty good on 4:3. TV is coming to all digital and HD. There is also no picture lost at the edges either. I see more edge area than I ever did the dinosaur analog TV's I owned. May as well not fight it and join the change. The days of the old "keyhole" TV screens is dying.

Tony, I don't think you're an "idiot", but you must understand what we're talking about here is *proper* aspect ratio. A television program designed and filmed for a 4:3 television should be watched in that ratio. On today's widescreen TV's, that means that if you're watching an episode if the old ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, there should be black bars on the sides to show everything that was visble then, with nothing out of shape and distorted.

TV manufacturers have come up with all sorts of ways to manipulate pictures, because they *know* that a large number of people want those wide screens filled, no matter what they're watching. So they have zoom settings, stretch-the-sides settings, and some that do both in varying degrees.

The bottom line is that no matter *how* you try to fill your screen with an old ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW, it's still not going to be correct. The shape of the picture, as designed by the directors, camera operators, and directors of photography, was basically the old squarish 4:3 screen.

But given these streching and cropping tools, there are ALWAYS going to be people who use them to improperly manipulate a picture to somehow fill up a screen that's wider than their old TVs were.

What's maddening to me are the channels that stretch things automatically themselves. Not normally a cable subscriber, I'm in a hotel room and was watching something on the History Channel. The show was 4:3 but stretched to the sides by the channel. To compensate, I switched it manually to the 4:3 mode which gave me the proper aspect ratio for the program. Then the commercials would come on and be scrunched. I couldn't win.

Harry
 
And just this past week, I was in a timeshare room with two big plasma TV's. Sharp Aquos models - about 46" screens.

The engineering clowns at this place had the sets locked down so you couldn't adjust them, and the standard-def cable coming in with 4:3 pictures were stretched and zoomed at the same time. This resulted in some slightly cropped-off heads, scrolling info at the bottom that was sometimes cut off, and short-fat-dumpy people on every channel.

There were no menus I could get into to changed things - heck, even the top-of-set controls were frozen out on one of the two sets.

It's good to be back home where I've got the picture set correctly.

Harry
 
There are adjustments on this model that make faces and other items look pretty good on 4:3.

Well there is the problem....too many people these days are more than happy to settle for "pretty good" instead of insisting that things look the way they're supposed to look. This is why people are also OK with bad-sounding mp3 music files and watching movies on iPhones.

The real tragedy is that people watch a distorted picture and don't even realize they're watching a distorted picture. As a movie theatre owner it just about drives me crazy to see a wrong aspect ratio.
 
Video and film buffs like us fought with the acceptance of letterboxed video for years. Now that they have a way to watch widescreen properly, they can't grasp the concept of the old 4:3 aspect ratio of standard television.
 
We can't win! (us film/video and audio file types). We are vioctims of the "lowest common denominator." :sad:

(in the military we call the lowest common denominator "The US Army" :laugh:)
 
Ooooooooh, that's a low one. :laugh:

I battle the same thing with vinyl vs. CD. No doubt vinyl has its shortcomings, but over the holidays, I played the Warner 180g vinyl version of Van Morrison's Moondance album that knocked everyone out with how good it sounded. It has to have the quietest surface I've (n)ever heard (it sounds like a master tape playing, the vinyl is so quiet), and one comment from someone who knows nothing about audiophilia remarked at how "natural" it sounded, compared to CDs.

It's that good.

And yet you can't convince some that vinyl can sound better than CDs. And that lossy compressed audio files sound different from lossless files. And they feel that a "big system" is only meant to play loud.... :sigh:
 
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