So, we finally entered the 21st century with a new --non-CRT-- TV purchase. I’m not happy that the aspect ratio in full-screen mode “shrinks” peoples’ heads. (Well everything, but it’s noticeable on faces.)
I’ve read on-line and apparently this is indeed a known issue. There are work-arounds with other settings but wide screen seems preferable to most people.
Those of you with more experience than I must know what I’m talking about. The work-arounds include settings that clip either the top and bottom, or the sides, but the aspect ratio is maintained. In wide-screen the 16:9 is not the same as the original 4:3 and so people look a little squished.
I have seen the effect on lots of other friends’ TVs of various brands too.
I think you are asking, do you stretch the 4:3 shows to fill the screen, or keep the correct aspect ratio and have black bars down the side?
Here in AU that issue only comes up with DVDs, as our 4:3 TV shows are automatically given the black bars on either side. I seem to recall hearing not all countries/networks do that.
Anyway, it’s down to personal choice. Squeezing shows into their correct aspect ratio will not harm your TV, though it may be slightly inconvenient to keep swapping back and forth throughout a broadcast day.
If a show is broadcast in 4:3 aspect ratio, you can either stretch it to fill your screen, or display it in the correct aspect ratio, with black bars on the side. That’s about all there is to it. The only other “solution”, if you are unhappy with either of those, is to watch 16:9 programming.
Thanks and gotcha. I just assumed, erroneously, that since just about everyone was viewing newer wide-screen TVs these days that the signal would be broadcast thusly.
So, it appears just about every signal (maybe all?) I’m receiving by satellite are plain old 4:3. I’m not sure why this would be au jour d’hui but there ya have it.
I’m not too sure about how satellite works, but my guess would be you have to pay an extra $5 / month or something to get HD programming, which is much more likely to be 16:9.
Is your satellite receiver outputting an HDTV signal? For satellite in Canada and probably everywhere else, HD channels are separate from the regular channels and you have to pay extra to get them. You may also need to get a new receiver that supports HD, and connect it to your TV with a cable that carries an HD signal.
Only HD signals will be in widescreen with no bars.
My HDTV has a setting that zooms in a 4:3 and then crops it to 16:9. So while you do loose a lot of picture in the cropping the ratio is correct nothing is streched out
Read the manual? You may have to find an online version to get detailed information. By default my (new) LCD telly just stretches the sides of a 4:3 picture so faces in the middle of the screen look normal. This is quite watchable compared to the lets just stretch the whole damn picture setting that I think looks crap. Is this an option for your TV?
HD programming will fit your new screen perfectly. And I say that with a whole host of "if"s and "but"s, because there are always exceptions: shows shot in HD at a 4:3 ratio, movies shown at higher aspect ratios requiring black bars at the top and bottom, and so forth. But generally, HD stuff will fill up your screen real estate all the way to the edges.
You really need to read the manual for your TV. If you just can’t stand having black bars on the side, and you also can’t stand the “stretched” look of 4:3 TV filling out a 16:9 screen, you may have a setting that’ll look better to you. On my TV, there are four settings: Normal, Full, Zoom, and Wide Zoom. With a 4:3 picture, Normal puts bars on the sides of the picture. Full stretches it horizontally to fill the screen. Zoom chops off the top and bottom, filling the screen and keeping things looking normal but losing some of the picture. Wide Zoom is a compromise: stuff in the middle of the screen, where most action happens, appears normal, but the picture is progressively stretched to the left and right, and squashed at the top and bottom. You get a screen-filling picture that’s not noticeably stretched or squashed until things get to the edge. Your TV may have a mode like that, but you’ll have to play with it or read the manual to find out.
Now, you haven’t elaborated about your setup much. If you have HD programming from your satellite provider, check it out, it should be beautiful. Make sure that your satellite box is connected to your new TV via either an HDMI connection (best) or a component video connection (red-green-blue RCA connectors). Other connections (S-video, composite yellow-red-white RCA cables, or RF) won’t carry the HD signal.
If you can get over-the-air (OTA) TV where you are, you should put up an antenna; the picture you get from an antenna, assuming you have a clear signal, will be better than anything you see over the satellite. Connect the antenna to the back of your new TV (assuming that your new TV has a digital tuner; most do these days), or to the back of your satellite box. Either way, you’ll need to go into the menus for the device you’ve plugged the antenna into and tell it to scan for channels. Then, enjoy your beautiful clear picture.
Food Network, for example, uses a edge-stretch widening on their HD output. The center of the screen is the proper aspect ratio, but the edges are stretched out. I hate it. (It’s similar to the “Wide Zoom” described by Max.)
Our remote (we have TW) allows us to zoom 4:3 aspects so we don’t get mushroom headed people. But you do lose some captioning at the bottom of the screen (which in the case of something like MSNBC is a good thing — you won’t be distracted by the damn crawler.)
Before I bought my first widescreen TV, I was worried that I would be bothered by stretching the 4:3 programs to the width of the screen. It turns out that after a month or so, I stopped noticing it. Like Small Clanger mentions above, most TVs do some kind of modified stretch that doesn’t seem to distort the picture much.
And if you would rather watch 4:3 programming with black bars down the sides, you get used to that fairly quickly as well.
What digital broadcasters are supposed to do is include Active Format Description (AFD) codes, which govern how the material will be displayed on screens with various aspect ratios. For example the code might indicate “this is 4:3 material; on a 4:3 screen display it full-screen; on a 16:9 screen, show it it in a ‘pillarbox’ (i.e. black bars down the sides)”. A different AFD code might mean “4:3 material, but fill the screen regardless of your aspect ratio”. Then you’d see a stretched image on a 16:9 TV.
What complicates all this is that the broadcasters or original producers sometimes mess around with the aspect ratio during production. For example, they might add bars to 4:3 material to make it fill a 16:9 frame. Then, even if the AFD code says “fill the screen”, you will still see black bars on a 16:9 screen because your receiving device cannot know that there are black bars hard-coded into the picture. Or maybe the broadcaster will do weirder things - it sounds like Food Network is preemptively smart-stretching 4:3 to fill a 16:9 frame (I’m not sure if there is an AFD code for that!). That’s OK if you like that kind of non-proportional stretching, but if you don’t, there’ nothing you can do.
Another complication is that widescreen TVs usually have user-selectable stretch modes. All in all, it’s a wonder that anyone gets to watch material in the correct aspect ratio.
I’ll just touch on something that I don’t think has been pointed out yet. When you have the black “pillar boxes” either side of the picture, nothing is being clipped, you’re seeing the entire picture, it’s just that the picture does not fill the edges of the TV screen.
What is there to get used to? 4:3 programming with some TV screen on either side looks just the same to me as 4:3 with wall on either side (i.e., how it looks on a 4:3 TV.)
I also can’t stand aspect ratios being screwed with, and luckily they don’t do that in Australia. If I want to screw with it myself I can, but otherwise it displays on my TV in its original aspect ratio.
The one that really pissed me off recently was a TV in a hotel room that had been set to stretch a 4:3 picture, but the picture itself had black bars top and bottom. So it could’ve nicely fit into the screen with no distortion but it was stretched WITH the black bars still visible. Who ever set that TV up was a real dumb fuck. Of course all of the TV menu buttons had been locked out so you couldn’t fix it.