Even when retransferred in HD, won't all fullscreen content need to be pillarboxed for presentation on HDTV, though? At least unless you like watching a distorted picture. Short of cropping it (which is as bad as Pan & Scan'ing a widescreen film, IMO) or rendering it at 1920x1440 instead; though since that's beyond the HD standard I doubt any TV would support it.

I suppose that was the disadvantage of basing the new standard entirely around widescreen content.. there's a whole bunch of great content made for TV, and theatrical features made prior to the 1950s that won't benefit 100% from HD viewing.

I never cease to be amazed by the number of viewers who see a stretched-out 4:3 image on a 16:9 set as being perfectly fine. Go into many restaurant bars or other business establishments and if they have a new widescreen set, yep, sure enough, there's a 4:3 NTSC image on it, all stretched out. If I gently point out to the keeper of the remote control that the image is all distorted, he looks at me like I'm from Mars. Don't you know this the NEW LOOK delivered by OUR EXPENSIVE NEW HDTV?

Go to the CNN website and check out their video section. Are these guys stoned, or what? Every single video, stretched out for your viewing satisfaction. Even the screen grabs are stretched.

One of our local San Francisco news stations (I only watch one station in the morning, maybe thay all do it) seems to put all their 4:3 graphics and feeds up on a 16:9 screen and then point a camera at it. At least that's what the traffic footage looks like. It's whacky, because they're still sending out an SD 4:3 signal in the end, but they have the widescreen monitors on the set to use during the newscasts so I think they're just pointing a camera at one of them.

I'm not naming names (KRON) but it's really sloppy work.

I think maybe I'll stop watching (all TV) for the next five years and see if it gets sorted out. I'll probably save a ton of money - I'm convinced that even if individual advertisements don't work the overall effect of ALL ads is to make you want "stuff".

Rob Mack

What I cannot understand is how come 16:9 TV sets sold in Europe since the early 90s have had Smart Stretch of 4:3 content to fit the 16:9 screen, and it looks great, while TV sets sold in the U.S. do pillarboxing or non-intelligent stretching that looks horrible.

(Smart Stretch leaves the center portion of the content as-is or stretched only very slightly, while the L & R sides get stretched progressively more. The center is usually where you'll find the most sensitive part of the picture, so it can't be squished.)

Don't forget that uprezzing tools have gotten better and better also. Depending on the program material, this can produce very acceptable "HD" content.

My 4 year old Samsung has all these options available at the push of a button:

16:9 native, which i also use for anamorphic 4:3 resulting in 16:9 undistorted.
Panorama, which leaves center of 4:3 undistorted [mostly] and progressively stretches the outer areas to fill the 16:9 display. This mostly works, unless there's a pan involved, in which case you get a disconcerting morphing effect.
Zoom1, which is great for filling the 16:9 display with letterboxed material in a 4:3 wrapper.
Zoom2, which is a higher magnification version of Zoom1 and I have yet to figure out why or when one would use it.
And last is 4:3, which is presented pillar-boxed.

The built-in tuner switches the modes automatically between 16:9 and 4:3 pillar-boxed.depending on what is being tuned. All of this can be manually overridden and I think you'll find that most distorted displays are due not to technical deficiencies in the equipment, but on operator error or just plain cluelessness.

I never cease to be amazed by the number of viewers who see a stretched-out 4:3 image on a 16:9 set as being perfectly fine. Go into many restaurant bars or other business establishments and if they have a new widescreen set, yep, sure enough, there's a 4:3 NTSC image on it, all stretched out. If I gently point out to the keeper of the remote control that the image is all distorted, he looks at me like I'm from Mars. Don't you know this the NEW LOOK delivered by OUR EXPENSIVE NEW HDTV?

It's not really that surprising, though. For the majority of people, owning a big, expensive TV has never been about anything other than impressing their equally stupid neighbours, and stroking their own egos. 98% of them could care less about picture quality. I don't think I've ever seen anyone look at the picture of a flat-panel HDTV and say anything other than "wow, what a great picture" or something to that effect.

Oftentimes the picture is anything but great, and depending on who it is and how much I like them; I'll either gently point out the obvious flaws in the picture and hope they learn something, or take great pleasure in abrasively deriding their total lack of knowledge and true appreciation of the technology. This second course of action is immensely satisfying, albeit probably a little mean, lol. I've never cared for people who bought things "just because", and I especially dislike ego strokers and like to take them down a peg whenever I can; for the betterment of all.

Regarding pillarbox graphics, there is a very cool article / tutorial on the vasst site addressing just this subject. Whenever we do a trade show and have to show SD video on a widescreen, the looping dvd is set to maximize the widescreen display by layering the 4:3 video on top of a blurred 16:9 version. In effect, the pillarboxes now are a blurred, lighter version of what is on the edges of the content anyway. Go to vasst.com and search for a tutorial on "convert 4:3 media for widescreen" for details.

I dunno... not sure I much care for these kind of tricks, or stretching in general; smart or no. Just as I preferred watching widescreen content letterboxed on a 4x3 TV, I think I'd rather just have pillarboxes for 4x3 content on a widescreen TV. For some it's about filling the entire screen of whatever television they're watching, but it should really just be about the original aspect ratio of the content.

That's the most sensible take on the topic ever posted here. Thanks!

We had one forum member a couple years ago who disliked the pillarboxing on his new HD TV so much that he seemed to think the manufacturer should have included some mechanism to hide the edges of the screen when displaying 4:3 material, or perhaps even change the physical shape of the screen to match what was being viewed.

I dunno, maybe i'm weird (ask any of my friends and they'll say there's no maybe about it), maybe i'm just a vertical person. I like 4:3 better than 16:9, and certainly way better than 2.21:1. Widescreen formats just seem way too restrictive to me. I keep wanting to duck my head so i don't bump the ceiling while i'm watching. I've had lots of fun creating some 1:1, 3:4, or even 9:16 videos. It's a very interesting effect to have the frame taller than it is wide. Shoot with the camera on it's side. Turn the TV 90 degrees to play it back. Impress people and make them think!

You may be weird, but you're not unique - I also prefer 4:3 to 16:9. Or, as I prefer to think of it, I prefer Tallscreen to Lowscreen.

Mark

To Each His Own, of course, but widescreen has been shown many times to be preferred over 4:3 on viewing tests.

A study was done by NHK in the 1980s where a display was resized and remasked and viewers were asked to rank them. The resulting graph showed a strong preference for the 14:9 and 15:9 (1.56 and 1.67, respectively) aspect ratios if viewers were relatively close to the screens, with rapid falloff for wider and narrower aspect ratios. That's why the first HD sets from Japan back in the late '80s were 15:9 ("5:3") shaped.

The official HD spec was later changed to 16:9 based partly on a paper by Kerns Powers of Sarnoff Labs and partly on a last-ditch effort by the Americans (Zenith) and Dutch (Philips) to stop the Japanese HD invasion.

Admittedly, the NHK study was of Japanese viewers. Also, perhaps the viewers were influenced by the popularity of widescreen cinema shapes. Filmmakers adopted widescreen ratios in the '50s as a counter to the new phenomenon called TV. So who knows what a truly unbiased viewer would choose.