No. No link to some crazy study. Just personal observation.
I just get insanely ticked at seeing my ridiculously overweight BIL watching regular TV in his plasma screen set up to stretch the image to fill the screen. Everybody looks fat, and I am sure that this somehow validates his self image, making everybody deformed like him.
Who on Earth wants to see normal people stretched into obesity? Everyone apparently. That’s how TVs are set up in all sports bars I have seen. And family homes. And stores. And everywhere else, pretty much.
I am probably the only person watching TV with black vertical bars on the sides of a normal image.
Will watching the world though a carnival looking glass make us even more desensitized to the creeping obesity problem that will kill this country?
(this is borderline Pit, mods move at their discretion)
I was at a party at a friend’s place and he turned the plasma TV on to catch the soccer score. He had his TV settings as you describe and I said “does that picture look stretched to anyone else?”
Then some guy said (with misplaced condescension) “Clearly you don’t have a flat screen TV. That’s how the picture is supposed to look.”
I figured no party was ever improved by arguing over TV settings so I let it go.
All the Plasma & LCD tv’s in my house have HD tv on them and none of them have stretched images even when its not broard cast in widescreen. It just has the sides all black.
All the widescreen plasma & LCD I have seen at friends houses are the same. I got no idea why anyone would want to see a stretched image :S
HD and Digital broadcasts should all be in 16x9, though some are in 4x3 with vertical bars on either side.
But analogue broadcasts will be in 4x3 and will stretch to fit a widescreen TV, unless you bugger around with the settings. Which shouldn’t be too hard to do.
Much of the broadcast content here is native widescreen now, but I have only just conceded that, yes, it’s OK to waste some of my screen for black bars when I’m watching content still in 4:3 format. Beforehand, I used the ‘letterbox’ setting on my TV - and it was OK for most viewing - it didn’t stretch anything, but there was a tendency for people’s faces to be visible only from the nose down - and this was worse on some programmes than others - I think there may have been a conscious decision somewhere at the beeb to minimise use of the upper and lower quarter strips of screen, but I might just be imagining that.
But I can completely understand the stretch mentality (not that I’m saying it isn’t ridiculous) - you think “I just paid x hundreds of pounds for this widescreen TV, I’ll be damned if I’m wasting any of it on black bars!”.
But as I say, I’ve embraced the black bars now, where they are actually still necessary.
Count me in as someone who has set their LCD flatscreen to 4:3 mode with the black bars on the side. We don’t have digital cable nor do we have satellite and cannot receive any HD programming (yet).
I’ve always thought that those who let the screen stretch to fill their flat screens were incredibly ignorant for not taking the extra minute to read the manual to find out how to change their settings.
It’s worse than that. There are plenty of people who prefer it that way. Why they would want to watch a distorted image, I have yet to figure out. They usually say something about the unused screen space being wasted if they don’t turn the picture into crap.
I saw my sisters big ass flat screen for the first time this weekend and saw the very effect in the OP. Even my luddite father was able to change the aspect with a single button. And yes, he seemed deeply torn between “wasting” the side areas and viewing a proper image. Personally, I like a proper image even if it means bars on the side.
I’ve seen the same thing with people who hate widescreen DVDs because they “ain’t payin’ to see no black bars at the top and bottom. I wanna see the WHOLE THING!” I couldn’t get them to understand that they ARE seeing the whole thing and that it’s the fullscreen that’s hiding stuff.
The worst of it is HD broadcasters who deliberately stretch 4x3 to 16x9 (or worse), and then broadcast it that way. You can’t fucking get rid of it to restore the correct ratio. Bastards.
(I’m looking especially at you TBS-HD, TNT-HD, and to a lesser extent History-HD.)
There are a couple of digital channels in the UK that do the opposite - they broadcast footage already framed - black at the sides and top and bottom - and even when it’s stretched to 16:9, it still makes everybody look thin and spindly. I expect there are some TVs with more flexibility in the scaling than mine, but I can’t get these channels to work properly, no matter what I do - I end up with a little square (and it really is square) in the middle of the screen.
I found one place where wide screen televisions display 4:3 programming in their proper aspect ratio: the lounge at the Shaker Heights Country Club. Unfortunately, this pleb doesn’t get too many opportunities to watch them.
Discovery Channel is the king of this crap, I think. This means I watch a little rectangle centered in my screen, surrounded by oceans of black screen. Luckily, one of the Aspects I can choose is a zoom level that is almost exactly right to make this fill the screen. The problem with this is that the onscreen channel guide ends outside the visible screen. :rolleyes:
I don’t think it is enticing them to eat. Just that it makes people 33% wider than normal more visually acceptable or customary. I can imagine someone failing all diets and setting the TV to full screen just to “stick it to the celebrities” by making them extra wide.
We either watch dvds or download tv shows from itunes and watch them through our ipods on our HDTV (sadly not in HD…yet).
The dimensions are constantly changing, but inevitably Mrs. WeHaveCookies will choose the setting that stretches everyone out, and then I’ll come in and change it.
Speaking of stretching out…my TV has a “panoramic” setting, but from what I can tell it just bends the picture at the far right/left margins. How is that fun? Who wants to watch a movie with distorted right/left margins?
My Panasonic plasma cleverly avoids the black burn-in problem by framing a 4:3 picture with bright gray bars.
Looks horrid, so we use the “just” mode - it’s an anamorphic stretch that leaves the center third or so unstetched so it’s not as drastic as a plain uniform stretch. OTOH, it does make text crawls on the morning news look a little odd.
What bugs me more than a little stretching on a 4:3 image is widescreen movies being mooshed in - 1:2.35 played off of a “16:9 enhanced” DVD results in no letterboxing and skinny people.