It happend as expected...

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Steve Mann wrote on 4/21/2007, 12:42 AM
The government and the TV manufacturers have done such a poor job of educating the public, there's going to be an awful lot of people who will be surprised.

Steve mann
Chienworks wrote on 4/21/2007, 5:23 AM
I wouldn't judge anything by TVs in sports bars. Every one i've ever seen has the saturation cranked all the way and the color balance shifted to some extreme value. I'll see 25 TVs all showing the same channel, yet one of them is bright red, another bright green, another bright purple ... etc. I think in these places the TV is merely a piece of decor, not so much an actual display device as much as something to add to the color and ambiance of the atmosphere.

My observation of the general public also assures me that people see less wrong with a 4:3 image stretched horizontally to fill widescreen than they do with black bars on the sides. Amost never do i hear the comment, "hey, everyone looks fat". I almost always hear the comment "how come the picture doesn't fill the screen?"
GlennChan wrote on 4/21/2007, 11:43 AM
To echo what PCamp is saying, a lot of work is still being delivered on betaSP.

I doubt that broadcasters will change over to broadcasting SD in widescreen since there is a lot of legacy material in 4:3 and a lot of people with 4:3 sets. For backwards compatibility you have to stick with 4:3 (much like how HD is 59.97fps instead of 60.00fps or 50.00fps to match PAL; and also why 1080i HD broadcasting is interlaced, even though interlacing makes little sense nowadays).
mark2929 wrote on 4/22/2007, 3:56 AM
I wouldn't mind betting the government will do what the manufacturers of TVs want and they want widescreen. Unless it ever gets to being a voting issue which it wont.
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/22/2007, 9:28 AM
Spend an hour at a major broadcast management organization such as Belo or other major broadcast organization. Your opinion of broadcasters not changing over to widescreen prior to or by Feb 17 2009 will likely change.
ESPN and others are doing it, now, overlaying 4:3 on wide, filling the pillarboxes with content or backgrounds. No one said 4:3 will be converted; it's that the standard of widescreen is being met using various (and creative) methods. I'd expect this is how legacy content will be broadcast in the future.
riredale wrote on 4/22/2007, 10:14 AM
John, take your wife to a friend's house with a big 16:9 set and have them show a widescreen DVD on it. When done right, even a 720x480 DVD image looks glorious. Tell her that she was very wise, waiting like this until the prices dropped and the technology matured, and that now is the time to buy. You'll get your set.

We bought a 62" Mitsubishi DLP a couple of years ago (3 months later, prices dropped $1,000--groan) and in our home we sit the typical 10' away from it. Throw pretty much any widescreen DVD on it and it's magic.

I guess the reason I made the comment earlier about sports bar widescreen sets is that you'd think the people controlling the set knew better. I'd have to conclude that people are generally technophobes who just assume that the manufacturer knows best and to just leave the screen presentation settings on default. Sure enough, on our DLP set the widescreen setting is called "Standard." So then I'd have to conclude the real blame falls on the standards bodies who didn't insist on a widescreen flag bit in line 21 or wherever that would tell the new sets how to display the material. I would have had narrowscreen as default for backwards compatibility.

To add insult to injury, there are some Hollywood movies out there that take their widescreen material and letterbox it within an assumed 4:3 format, in other words making it a 720x360 format. What a mess.