Hi i went and had a look at some HD wide screen TV's at harvey norman the other day and noticed that some of there TV's weren't filling in the whole screen with what was on!

The aspect ratio's were set to either auto or 16:9

So i asked one of the "trained" staff about it and he said that sometimes the TV show that is on is sent through as a different aspect ratio to 16:9 and there is nothing you can do to fix the problem!


when i say the picture doesn't fill the whole screen i mean that it is square in the middle of the screen

I understand that there is gaps from top to bottom but never left to right and square in the middle

I have a wide screen picture tube TV and it fills the screen 100% of the time!

I have just ordered a 50inch plasma TV and don't want to have this problem as my wide screen picture tube TV displays just fine!

Has anyone else ran into this problem with there TV's?

 

IRRC Austrailia uses the same system as the US. Perhaps you were viewing the standard 4:3 format instead? There are sets that will yield 4:3, wide, normal wide, full, and true 16:9 images. Check to see if your new set features the full or normal wide selections... that way when viewing the old 4:3 ratio, you'll still get a full screen but somewhat strectched and slightly distorted as a trade-off.

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I went through all the settings and they all show pretty much the same results!

why would they leave formats on 4:3 on very popular and modern TV shows?

when i went to harvey norman they had a show called video hits, very up to date and popular and its HD, and still all the setting would still show 4:3 format.

and some other TV's were full screen

My TV at the moment (picture tube) displays wide screen all the time and its set on "natural".

 

No, Australia uses PAL, 625 line and 50Hz frame, like most of Europe does.

Essentially though widescreen is a bodge!.

There are basically two types of TV's 4:3 and 16:9, with almost all modern sets been 16:9.

Analogue transmissions (at least in the UK) are transmitted as one of three, 4:3, 16:9 (quite rare), or 14:9 - 14:9 is used as a compromise between the two 'real' formats. Digital TV is different, with mostly 16:9 used, and small amounts of 4:3, but probably no 14:9.

Films are a different problem again, as their widescreen format is far wider than TV, so they are either cropped to 16:9, or transmitted as 16:9 with black bars top and bottom.

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The letterbox effect actually brunt into a mates new Plasma. Given that he only ever used it for movies, he probably should have brought an LCD!

Make sure that you get about 100 hours of full screen viewing with your new plasma, its one of the only real downfalls, but if kicked off right, most are almost impervious to burn-in.

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Spency.

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Yes, having black bars is one of the worst things you can do with a Plasma, you should only need to be careful for the first few months though, because most of the 'burn in' is complete by then.

It's probably one of the reasons why LCD has replaced Plasma, with Plasma very much a minority now.

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