I have a question for the more astute among us about HDTV and television aspect ratios; Why is it common for people to watch a deliberately distorted image? I just spent a nauseating 2 hours in front of a wide screen television watching the Superbowl. The reason is simple. When an HDTV broadcast is viewed it looks great, but that is to be expected. This is not what I am talking about. I am speaking of the common tendency to always use the wider screen even for normal aspect ratio broadcasts. The standard aspect ratio for horizontal to video measurements is 4:3. The new widescreen format is 16:9, or a ratio that is far less square.
When a picture designed for a 4:3 ratio is projected onto a 16:9 screen, the image is literally stretched to accommodate the larger screen. This has the very disturbing effect of squashing the screen and distorting the images. For me, this produces an image that makes me dizzy. Isn't there a way to produce a correctly oriented image, by using side bands?
I suspect that it might be me, because everyone who shows me these distorted screens wants to tell me how great it looks. It looks like we might be about to launch into the HD era, but until this problem is fixed, count me out.
1 comment:
Ché,
I'm glad to hear that I not alone in my dissatisfaction of a "stretched" image. I also talked to Dad about this, but I cannot understand why so many people view the image this way. My theory is that the TV defaults to that image and they never bother to change it.
To many of my friends are seduced by the size of the image without paying too much attention to the image quality. I attribute it to my refined sense of taste, but Tracy just thinks that I am an anal retentive asshole.
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