Discussion on:

Hey YouTube! Can you say ANAMORPHIC

Most people don't care about the quality. I've noticed the opposite problem: When people get 16:9 TVs, they tend to display 4:3 pictures stretched out to fill the 16:9 because they want their "widescreen". Apparently watching a distorted picture is better than having those bars on the sides.

I don't like pillarboxing. If I am watching a standard def show, it is going to look crappy on my HDTV anyway, so why no let it fill the screen?

I get more annoyed at HD channels that pillarbox the SD commercials (although I am betting the advertisers are the ones who require it).

I have 65" of widescreen. I want it filled!

I mean your avatar - with a pink ribbon.

Please, Smorty?

GG

Yikes, I hate fat TV. There are widescreen TVs that will run a compromise mode where it crops a little off top and bottom and does a little bit of banding on the side. This way you're not loosing too much screen real-estate on the sides but you're not chopping too much off either. This is the mode I prefer but it's not available on my 72" DLP. It will do stretch (which is ugly as hell) or it will do side bars. I'll take the side bars over distorted geometry any day. I absolutely can't stand vertical only stretching. That's just horrible.

Most 4:3 content isn't going to be visually rich and worthy of maintaining the original aspect ratio (i.e. reality shows, news, talk shows). Most shows that you care to see in OAR are already in HD.

If I am going to watch "The Real World" or "Project Runway" (don't judge me!), then fatter people are just fine with me.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/Ou/?p=296
That blog is for people just like you.

Also, what do you think happens when you're displaying letterboxed content? You still get the bars and the stretching which is the worst of both worlds. I see them doing this in electronic stores. If you were doing top and bottom crop mode, you'd effectively crop the black bars and not distort the image.

so it isn't that big of a deal to me.

I play XBOX 360 in HD and watch most of my shows in HD. I watch very little SD 4:3 content, so it doesn't matter to me.

But just for you, I will watch something tonight pillarboxed just to make sure that I'm not missing out

My Toshiba HD TV has a display mode that stretches 4:3 to 16:9, but the "stretch factor" is smaller at the center than at the edges. So objects in the center of the screen are only a little fatter than normal, and objects get fatter as they move to one side of the screen or the other.

Gordon

You should spend more time filling your brain with
information rather than filling your screen with nonsense.

About everyone I know does that and it drives me up a wall. Why would anyone want EVERYONE on TV to look like they belong on Star Trek? They must be diehard trekkies. There can be no other logic to that. Sometimes I dare to suggest that they can "fix" those misshappen heads, but they assure me that it is by choice. I try not to make any gutteral sounds in reply.

with looking like they belong on Star Trek??? Be vewy vewy careful. There are many of us here at TR that are ST fans.

"Apparently watching a distorted picture is better than having those bars on the sides."

There are a few explanations for this. They don't realize that filling 16 by 9 makes everyone and everything look 33% fatter. This means a square looks like a flat rectangle and a circle looks like a flat oval. If they see the picture filled, they think they're getting their money's worth in screen size. They either don't care or they don't know any better.

This of course drives me up the wall that people would rather watch distortion instead of quality. It's like gamers who turn off V-Sync just to get higher posted frame rates even though their monitor can't display the full frame properly. It's a psychological thing. Seeing the higher frame rate score makes them feel better rather than watch the frame rate pegged at a smooth 60 fps where every frame is displayed properly. It's like giving someone fine chocolate and they toss it in the garbage and reach for the candy bar.

I think marketing people came up with the term "wide screen" to make people feel their "standard screen" wasn't as wide as it could be and therefore needed to be replaced.

How else could they encourage people to buy standard size HDTV screens which, for perhaps the majority of viewers with small to medium sized screens, would look only marginally better, and then only if they were looking closely for high clarity. After all most people might have been able to tell, but normally wouldn't notice, a standard VHS picture from an off-air picture.

"I know how else" said a marketing man one day. "Let's chop the top and bottom off the screen and make it shorter. They'll think HDTV and short screens come hand in hand, that'll make them buy HDTV."

"I like it" said the other marketing man, "but let's face it, we really need to sell these to men and we can't make 4x4 televisions. Most men cringe at the word "short" so lets call them "wide screens". Who cares if people are stuck with cropped, chopped, stretched pictures with black bars at the sides for years to come, wider is bigger is better. From now on, I don't want to hear that word short again."

And so it goes. People buy short screen laptops now to spend most of their time working on portrait Word documents. Sure their laptops are wider than they need to be with blank space on either side of the keyboard, or their screen panel has blank plactic on top and underneath the "wide" screen, but their Word documents look great if they convert them all to landscape!!

In fact, movies are even wider than 16:9. Humans travel and move horizontally, therefore it makes more sense to have wide aspect ratio images.

Thanks for your article, it was a real eye opener for me. It
explains why I see so much distorted TV around and why HBO
still shows everything in pan and scan. Only real film lovers care
about how the image is presented. The fact that there are so
many different aspect ratios doesn't help and how 16:9 was
settled on for HD was almost arbitrary.

But frylock, you will have to conform your work to the format of
YouTube and live with black bar on the top and bottom.

Thank God for TCM.