It disturbs me a little, but not enough for me to adjust the format every time I switch channels. In any case, I think I can only adjust the format on the TV remote, which I rarely use, and not on the cable box remote, which we use much more often. So it’s actually a pain to make the picture look precisely right on every channel. So I just live with it.
I feel exactly the same way!! I know numerous people who do this. Upon asking them, everyone - without exception - justifies it by saying that they want to get the biggest picture possible, and that they don’t care if the image is distorted. It’s all I can do not to break down in a FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU!!!
That bugs me too. I don’t have a wide screen TV yet, but the ones I’ve played around with seem to have various “zoom” modes, with different ratios, some of which have black bars, some stretch the picture, and others drop parts of the picture off the edges. However, there’s not a mode that says “just show me the picture at its intended ratio and use as much of the screen you can”. Am I just missing it?
That’s the problem right there. It’s BS HD. All’s they do is take SD and stretch it to fit a 16:9 screen. My TV allows me to force it back to 4:3 so I’ll do that and still watch the HD channel because it still looks better than SD. A lot of cable channels do that crap. I’d rather they just leave it in 4:3 because even if it’s not an true HD program it still looks way better coming in on an HD stream than SD.
My LG has it (the ‘set by program’ option) but Sony doesn’t. It’s Wide Zoom, Normal, Full, and Zoom. One of them stretches the sides more than the centre, so if you’re in the centre of the screen, you look fine. Fortunately the aspect ratio has its own button on the remote so you don’t have to root around in menus to find the ‘remove oompa loompa effect’ mode.
My Blu-Ray player does this for me. It is one of the reasons I am very happy. It’s called ‘telescope’ mode, if I remember right. 4:3 to 16:9. Even when the show changes ratio. (For example, watching an older TV show, the menu is in 16:9, the show is in 4:3.)
My Hitachi has this and it works so well with 4:3 programming I hardly ever switch to something else. The middle third of the picture stays unchanged, the outer thirds are stretched out to the ends of the screen. It’s pretty unusual to see horizontal destortion unless you look for it. I find it far preferable to zooming andlosing the top and bottom of the image, especially when there are subtitles. There is a ‘plain zoom’ feature which works pretty well if your original material is in letterbox and the zoom basically eliminates the bars.
Is this not a common feature?