I was in the store the other day and I was looking at all the new TVs and noticed that some of them are a lot wider than others. The picture seemed to be distorted. There was a woman on the screen doing a newscast, and her face looked stretched out and wide. On the regular TV she looked normal.

I asked the salesperson what was wrong with the picture and he said that it is supposed to look that way. I know the camera is supposed to add ten pounds but the poor newscaster looked like she gained 50 pounds. So I asked the sales person to put in a DVD so I could see what it looked like. I would think that if you put in a "widescreen version" of a movie that it would take up the whole screen of the TV. But Noooo. It was stretched out as well. It looked really bad.

So my question is, what is the point of having a wide TV? I would think that having a wide TV would allow you to watch widescreen DVDs and have them take up the whole screen, rather than having the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. I would also think that you would have two vertical bars on the left and right side when you are watching a regular TV show, so it is not all stretched out. Am I wrong in thinking this? Are all the female newscasters really that chubby? Or did the salesman really not now what he was talking about? I would really like to know more about these wider TVs.

Justin

The TV's you refer to are "Theater Wide" 16:9 Aspect
Ratio. Basicly for Theater Movies the correct aspect
ratio is 16:9 but for normal television broadcast it
is much smaller. What happens is that instead of the
sales person setting the TV to show broadcast in letter
box format they set it to display full screen which in
turn distorts the image. I watch as much TV as I do
movies and for me Theater Wide was a waste of money.

My $0.02

Justin, you are correct, and the salesman was full of bull. He had the set mis-adjusted. Wide TVs can be set to stretch the picture to fill the screen, but most of them only stretch out the outer edges, so the middle third is not so distorted.

There is more than one way to view a 4:3 picture on a widescreen TV. The TV can be set to 'zoom in' so the picture reaches the sides without stretching, but you lose top and bottom info, or, as you surmised, side bars can be added. (Actually, they aren't 'added', the scanning beam, or 'raster', simply starts and ends without exciting the phosphor spots along the sides, so the sides appear dark.)

Also, there is more than one way for a TV to display a wide picture. The term 'anamorphic' refers to the process of intentionally pre-distorting the picture with lenses, and displaying the picture by un-distorting the picture with lenses upon playback. (At least, in movie theaters with real film, lenses are used. It's done electronically in widescreen TVs.)

The purpose of 'squeezing' the picture, instead of simply not using the top and bottom bands as done on widescreen (letterboxed) laser discs and non-anamorphic DVDs, is that the entire height of each frame is used, which allows for the maximum vertical resolution. Letterboxed movies simply don't use the top and bottom several lines (several dozens, actually), so when the picture is enlarged vertically on a widescreen TV, fewer lines of picture are spread out to fill the screen vertically. Hence, less resolution than the TV is capable of.

When you saw the distorted picture in the store, the 4:3 picture was stretched to fill the screen, which required exciting more dots than the non-distorted picture required, so larger actually meant less horizontal resolution.

Most people don't know this, but widescreen movies are actually 'clipped' top and bottom to some extent. This allows for masking props, microphones, and the like, as well as allowing for less picture loss when the movie is shown on a non-widescreen display. Compare the widescreen and standard sides DVD of A Bugs Life sometime, comparing the distance between characters' heads and the top of the screen.

Larry