Quote:
“Originally posted by squidgy
Well, I don't have a widescreen telly, I guess I'd like one but am not really keen to splash out just yet.”
Neither do I, but I still watch everything in widescreen. I really can't stand seeing films with half the picture missing, I just get sooooo frustrated by it.
Quote:
“Mind you, had a problem when I got really enthusiastic about a film and brought it round to a friend's house to try to play it on their brand new Sony Playstation 2. They only have a normal telly. I checked the PS2 instructions about how to change between 16:9, 4:3 and 4:3 pan scan, I managed to use the PS2 gamepad to navigate to where this aspect ratio option appears in the menus, but only 16:9 was available. Unlike what it said in the instructions, I couldn't change it to 4:3. I was able to change the other video settings, though.”
Now this is a different thing - telling the DVD player you are using a 4:3 or 16:9 TV, so it displays the film in the correct aspect ratio and not all stretched, is a good thing - this is not the same as zooming in though
Quote:
“Result? Everyone in the film looked tall and skinny, and there was nothing I could do about it, I couldn't make it play in letterbox or panscan. Fortunately, they had a computer with PowerDVD installed on it, this rendered the picture correctly so we used that instead. Yes, they're into all this United Devices Cancer Research malarkey, and leaving this running whilst using PowerDVD can make for a rather jerky picture, but they didn't mind shutting UD down to watch a film, they were really enthusiastic to watch the film themselves by then.
My serious opinion is that when you suspect that your friends have a tendency towards anorexia or bulimia, and all the cognitive distortions that go with it, then setting the aspect ratio right on the TV and DVD player is extremely important! I would rather people didn't see a film at all than run the risk of severe psychological trauma caused by incorrect aspect ratio.”
You seem to be talking about a different thing here - there's zooming (where the play artifically zooms on on the image, in effect removing the black bars) and there's displaying the picture "anamorphically" or "non-anamorphically" - where the picture is either enhanced for widescreen TVs by being tall and thin, and using more of the picture lines, or reduced to standard resolution for display on a normal TV... not the same thing as zooming at all
Nothing wrong with using the player to convert anamorphic DVDs so they look normal (complete with black bars) on a 4:3 TV, but zooming is icky... it's worse even than normal pan&scan because it just zooms in on the centre of the picture, rather than moving around with the action as a "properly" pan&scanned transfer would do...
Mark
Mark