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4:3 programmes are no different, simply watch them as 4:3 on your wide-screen TV with black bars down the sides, as intended.
You don't own one of these new flatscreen thnigies then Nigel?
It would be nice if that worked but it doesn't, many of these TVs will give close to 4:3 and black bars, but the picture is still deformed in aspect. Likewise ALL their modes can be imperfect based on TVs i've seen, it's particularly annoying with people having "squished" heads or "fat" heads.
And as for image quality, LCD TVs just plain suck. The blacks are dark grey, never a perfect black no matter how much you tweak the contrast and brightness) and this is very annoying if trying to do a movie night with the lights turned down.
And that awful digital compression messing up the picture... People get used to watching these LCD things with all their nasty faults, but they are nowhere near the quality of a good CRT with perfect blacks, razor sharp detail, correct aspect ratio and litle to no MPEGing (although that depends on the signal source).
At the very least with LCDs they should allow tweaking of the aspect ratio so you don't have to spend the next ten years looking at squished heads and fat heads.
And as for image quality, LCD TVs just plain suck. The blacks are dark grey, never a perfect black no matter how much you tweak the contrast and brightness) and this is very annoying if trying to do a movie night with the lights turned down.
Hi,
It would be entirely possible to design an HD 16:9 television set that actually does 4:3 and uses ALL of the pixels to do so, but it would probably be considered ridiculous because the user would have to get up to rearrange the screen size, unless of course someone wanted to implement motors to get the screen size to 'transform' by itself. This wouldnt make that much difference really so we're stuck with watching 4:3 on a 16:9 at least for now and having to loose all those pixels in the side bars. It's just too silly to try to do it any other way.
But there's also the 'stretch' mode available on at least some sets. That's where you set the screen size to stretch the 4:3 out horizontally and take the cut in the picture content on the top and bottom. It functions similar to a ZOOM+CROP and it does work and allows viewing of the picture in a larger format then would be otherwise possible on a standard modern 16:9 set. You actually loose the very top and bottom of the movie content itself, but it's not that significant most of the time. So you may want to try that just to see how you like it. Be aware it will cut out part of the picture (top and bottom) but for normal picture content it doesnt always matter.
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Perhaps you're used to imperfect CRT geometry?, which was usually pretty awful - flat screens give perfect geometry, assuming you set then to the correct mode.
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Hi,
But there's also the 'stretch' mode available on at least some sets. That's where you set the screen size to stretch the 4:3 out horizontally and take the cut in the picture content on the top and bottom. It functions similar to a ZOOM+CROP and it does work and allows viewing of the picture in a larger format then would be otherwise possible on a standard modern 16:9 set. You actually loose the very top and bottom of the movie content itself, but it's not that significant most of the time. So you may want to try that just to see how you like it. Be aware it will cut out part of the picture (top and bottom) but for normal picture content it doesnt always matter.
Not at all, I've got pro TV repair experience over a 20+ year period Nigel and like you have spent many of those years tweaking customer's CRT aspects.
I think you are watching digital TV only in the UK where the transmission is already sent in digital 16:9 format?
The LCDs here give poor aspect ratios, mainly myself and friends watch Foxtel etc from satellite box, where the output is analogue via PAL composite, on a good 4:3 CRT the picture is flawless, on LCD the blacks are far from black and the aspects are bad, like I said squished or fat heads. The same problem exists on watching DVDs from a player or hard drive recorder, on composite and also watching shows or content that was made for 4:3 aspect.
I think the LCDs have two problems, getting good aspect from composite or SVGA input, and also in re-formatting 4:3 content to display on 16:9. You can try all the settings on the player aspect and the TV aspect but the final aspect is never perfect which if you have a good eye for aspect ratio is REALLY irritating.
Cropping or stretching on the either side of the original picture is something I am much fed up with nowadays.
I have been searching for some old 4:3 movie DVD's for collection purpose. What these guys are doing now is they zoom and crop top/bottom and claims that the copy is 16:9 widescreen ready format! Here the aspect ratio may be ok, but I lost lots of details, it looked like viewing only the center part of the movie everything zoomed. It fits well in a widwscreen TV though.
But these 'tweaked' formats sometimes creates black bars on all the sides while played on a widescreen computer. crap!
All I wanted is the original video as is.
All digital transmissions here are 16:9, I can't imagine why yours would be any different? - if it's a 4:3 programme, the TV either displays it with black bars at the sides (so perfectly correct), or stretches it, either horizontally (fatty vision), or in both directions, cropping the top and bottom of the picture - depending how it's set of course.
On HD channels 4:3 programmes are often transmitted with black bars inserted at the sides, so you have no TV settings that can alter it (it's just a 16:9 transmission).
No such problems here - LCD's give perfect geometry, which is why there are no adjustments for it - any problems must be with your sources?.
Why would you be using Composite, it's the worst possible method - here we use RGB (if not HDMI), but you have Component there which is almost as good as RGB (just a VERY slightly encoded version of RGB).
All digital transmissions here are 16:9, I can't imagine why yours would be any different? - if it's a 4:3 programme, the TV either displays it with black bars at the sides (so perfectly correct), or stretches it, either horizontally (fatty vision), or in both directions, cropping the top and bottom of the picture - depending how it's set of course. ...
...Why would you be using Composite, it's the worst possible method - here we use RGB (if not HDMI), but you have Component there which is almost as good as RGB (just a VERY slightly encoded version of RGB).
I'm amazed you haven't seen the poor picture of a LCD set running from any 4:3 analogue source! It annoys the heck out of me when I go to friends and families houses how crap their picture is compared to my good quality CRT set. Combined with the lack of any decent black level on LCD TVs it has totally put me off buying one even though they are big and cheap.
Quality of the scaler... I guess that makes perfect sense. With analogue input and 4:3 aspect content really being relegated to "obsolete" status these days it explains why all the new sets do such a bad job of displaying it.
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