No, with widescreen you see more picture, not less (although it is smaller).

Explanation here: http://www.widescreen.org/widescreen.shtml

Yes you see more picture on a widescreen TV. But when something is recorded in widescreen but played on a normal television part of the picture is cut off. Makes for terrible viewing.

When something filmed in widescreen is watched on a normal 4:3 TV the edges of the picture are sometimes cut off. This is called pan and scan (which I hate)

The only way to see the whole picture on a 'normal' TV is to have the black bars, hence making the actual picture seem smaller, but you get to see a lot more.

If you look at the examples on the link I gave, you'll see what I mean.

But almost every show on television is broadcast in that way. What different will one more make? I personally don't even think about it when watching on a 4:3 TV.

But that is dependant on the broadcasters inserting the black bars and recording it that way?
I don't see very many programmes on TV with the black bars - mostly movies.

I found him quite amusing

the aussie big brother is being broadcast, and streamed over the internet in widescreen ratio, and it looks great on a 50 inch plasma

Ohhh widescreen i remember widescreen, wasnt he a she?

I remember her being quite fond of Kenzie

Cant be that expensive to film in widescreen, I bought a cannon xl2 and it films in widescreen and thats affordable ( kinda ) for normal people to buy ( like me )

That's surprising, since many (increasingly more) TV shows are being filmed and broadcast in widescreen. Also, the majority of adverts are widescreen (I think actually all), although over analogue these are shown at 14:9 (thinner bars) which is a compromise between fullscreen and widescreen.

So I'm guessing you must be watching over digital with the digibox set to pan and scan (so the picture is cropped and zoomed in to fit your TV, missing the edges) or set to widescreen as if you had a widescreen TV but don't, so that the pictures are all vertically stretched which means no black bars, but looks terrible!

That way you'd only have black bars on a really wide film 1:2.35 or 40 which is what all the big blockbusters use.

Channel 4, funnily enough, broadcast some of their US dramas in widescreen on analogue, I've noticed. C4 don't make sense.

I thought it was a she.

Depending on how you deal with the problem, fitting a 16:9 picture onto a 4:3 screen can result in the 'cutting off' of some of the picture. It will never result in the cutting off of someone's head though, as any bits cut off are always at the side of the screen.

This can be asurprisingly tricky area though. You'd be amazed how many times I've spent about an hour drawing numerous diagrams for a supposedly clued-up TV producer, and still been left with the impression that they didn't really grasp what I was trying to explain...

Its not as easy as all that to make it widescreen either. Material that originated on 4:3 equipment and has been converted to 16:9 generally fails to meet most broadcasters technical specs and is only permitted for a good reason - ie. archive material for example. Aspect Ratio Convertors are anyway very expensive machines so to attach one to each camera would be prohibitively pricy. Also true widescreen camera are much more expensive - cheaper models merely miss out scanlines and therefore produce pictures that are not considered broadcast quality...

In my experience, Channel 4 will always broadcast something in the aspect ratio it is filmed in (or as close as they can get).

As explained above, consumer (even high end consumer) equipment does widescreen by missing scanlines. This (along with most other forms of electronic alteration of the picture) reduces quality to the point where it is not acceptable for broadcast. If you have seen the output from a broadcast standard camera (OK, we only have D9 cameras and JVC DV500s, but they are still better than consumer level camcorders), you would see that consumer level is noticably worse.