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Aspect ratio horrors

Posted by Steve Schell (M) on September 4, 2005 at 08:38:59

Hi group,

Last night I visited a friend and had a first look at his new 42" Panasonic plasma set. It was driven by a new Tosiba DVD player. The picture was beautiful, but the first thing I noticed was that the aspect ratio was wrong; the 4:3 picture was being stretched horizontally to fill the 16:9 screen.

When driven by its broadcast TV tuner, the Panasonic would play 4:3 images properly, placing grey bars on either side of the image. Playing DVDs though, nothing we tried would make the set display the image without stretching it horizontally. The set seemed to disregard commands to establish a 4:3 picture when fed the DVD source. After an hour of trying everything we could think of, reading both manuals, trying the composite hookup rather than HDVI, etc., we gave up.

Is it possible that with new current components it might be impossible to display DVD images in the correct aspect ratio? The TV manual actually suggests that the 16:9 ratio is the recommended way to view a 4:3 NTSC image, and a small diagram accompanying the recommendation shows a circle on a sreeen being distorted into an oval. I have also noted with alarm in recent months that wherever I go, people are watching distorted, stretched images on 16:9 sets without complaint.

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