Flat Screen TV pet peeve

[don87109]

Maybe it's the TV's I buy (Sharp, Samsung, Panasonic), but many programs just don't fill the screen having black bars on the sides or the top and bottom.
Yes, in most cases the image can be expanded to fill, but usually portions of the screen are lost. That is, to stretch the width you generally lose picture through spillover on the top and bottom, similarly sides spillover when stretching the top and bottom.

I have even seen 16:9 images displayed on a 16:9 TV with black bars. Why should that be? My Sharp has a feature called smart stretch which automatically adjusts picture size. It works okay, but sometimes even native 16:9 shows have spillover and I have to switch to dot-by-dot mode (I guess it's not that smart).

Apparently it's a big challenge to fit the various size broadcasts to a TV screen. I just received a gift of a Panasonic Blu-ray DVD player and still had problems filling the screen with a Spiderman 3 DVD. This DVD was some kind of sample not-for-sale disc for promo purposes so maybe that was the problem.

Anyway, does anybody have a particular TV manufacturer/model that does a good job filling the screen with minimal overspill?

Don

[haklesup]

Its not really the TV's fault. Right now there is a haphazard mix of resolutions being broadcast some upscaled others native. For the most part if I view HD stations, I get a full screen (but not always) but when I watch SD stations, I can get anything, often switching resolution for commercials. As for the DVD upscaling issues, its probably the DVD players fault.

Mostly I don't streach, expand or magnify (though my LG and Samsung do have these options) my pictures but I do have one smaller set that does it well (a magnavox, made by ?). It stretches the picture non-linearly, more at the edges and less in the middle. When subjects move to the edge of the screen they either seem to accelerate or expand as they move. its not very noticable on that small 17" screen though.

I can't wait to see 3D TV demo'd. I feel like the year before HD came out. I won't be buying in for a few years yet. Mobile DTV should emerge this year as well (Finally)

[MrAl]

Hello there,


Before i bought my LCD TV i looked into the various sizes and how they would appear
on the screen. I made sure i got a size that would at least be equal to the previous
size if it had to show a picture that was smaller than the TV frame itself.

The problem is basically a geometric one. The TV has a certain shape which can be
described as an "aspect ratio" (see web), while the content to be displayed can have
one of many different aspect ratios. That's the real problem. There is no way to show
program content that is made for one aspect ratio on a TV made for another aspect
ratio without some loss of screen pixels (which appear as dark bands) or alternately
loss of picture content itself (spill-over as you called it).

The only 'solution' is to buy an LCD TV that is quite a bit larger than what you really
want, so that way you can display all of the content yet allow dark bands and still
get a large enough picture to be comfortably viewable from your required distance.

Another thing to think about is a super wide screen TV. Im not sure if they make these
yet but way back when i read that they intended to. These are TV's that are wider
than the typical LCD so they can display the true movie format better than the
average LCD TV. If you can't find this, then you'll just have to buy a bigger TV
and put up with the bars.

There may be some comfort in knowing that this was a problem a long time ago
too, before LCD's came out. We just didnt know about it because all of the editing
was done behind the scenes. When we saw something on the TV it looked as though
it was made that way, but in fact many times it was altered to fit in the typical
4:3 aspect ratio TV frame before LCD's came out. All this time we were loosing some
program content for some shows and didnt realize it.

[Robert Reed]

Remember the times that when choosing a TV, the only thing of concern was whether it had two IF stages or Three ( and of course the CRT size )? Seems life was so much less complicated. And MrAl as to your reference of aspect ratio, you don't hear that tossed around to much of late. The original aspect ratio was 4:3. Why- because that's how the human eye sees things. Just simple ergonomics. With the super wide ratios, I seem always tempted to "lift the lid" to see what I am missing up there.