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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.
Follow Ups:
I really appreciate all of the informed responses to my questions. I asked my friend to read the responses. He did so, and now reports that he can watch his DVDs in the correct aspect ratio when the player is set to output the lowest of three available HDMI resolution settings. On the higher resolutions, the TV automatically goes full screen. So, for now it seems to be the choice of correct aspect ratio or most detailed picture, but at least the correct aspect ratio is available.Again, thanks very much.
Yes, this is common in some widescreen TV stores.The idea that they would take a regular aspect ratio TV broadcast, and stretch it to make it fill a widescreen, when you can clearly see that people's faces are stretched as in a funhouse mirror; all the while presenting it as some sort of improvement over the option of wearing some sort of Crazy Goggles...just staggers the mind! Or am I just "golden eyed"? Don't people realize what they are looking at?!?!
Ben, if you are "golden eyed" then that makes two of us. I am really bothered by aspect ratio errors- even 1950 era round picture tube sets didn't do that to the image.It's starting to look like we are in the era of the stretched image; I see it all over the place. Hopefully this will be worked out in time, as most source material becomes 16:9. It is funny though how most people seem not to even notice this gross distortion.
nt
How many settings for aspect ratio does the TV monitor have? My SONT HD RPTV has four:NORMAL: for any 4:3 material
FULL: for anamorphic DVDs
ZOOM: for any non anamorphic wide screen material
WIDE ZOOM: to stretch 4:3 material to a wide screen (useless to me)
As well as just deinterlacing to 480p, many DVD players these days can upsample the 480i data on the DVD to 1080i and 720p. The higher rate signals (1080i and 720p) will only be available from the Toshiba's HDMI output. If the signal is being upsampled, many displays will not give you aspect ratio control as the 1080i (1920x1080) and 720p (1280x720) formats are expected to be 16x9 (1.78:1), not 4x3 (1.33:1).Is this the way your friend is feeding the signal to his plasma? If so, try sending a 480p or 480i (if the Toshiba can output this format) signal via HDMI instead. Aspect ratio control should then be available.
Hi Joe,From what my friend told me, it seems you hit the nail on the head. Thanks.
One more question, if I may: do the upsampled 720p and 1020i signals offer truly increased resolution over the 480p or 480i? I haven't been back to my friend's house yet to have a look. "Deinterlacing" doesn't sound good, but as you can tell by now I haven't kept up with modern video technology- too much time spent with horns and compression drivers I guess.
The simple explanation is that deinterlacing combines the two fields of interlaced video into a frame. A progressive display shows the entire frame at one time, instead of showing the odd lines then the even lines (it's done quckly so your eye doesn't easily notice that it is only seeing half the information at a time) as an interlaced display does. A progressive display will deinterlace (think of this word as meaning "reconstructing") an interlaced signal before it is displayed and will just pass through a progressive signal (since it's already in the proper format for display) such as 480p and 720p.Whether an upscaling player provides any real advantage is the subject of much debate, but here's the real (potential) advantage. Some HD displays, even ones that cost a fortune, have poor scalers and feeding a 720x480 signal to one of them just results in an OK picture when the image is scaled to the displays native resolution (ie; 1280x720, 1366x768, 1920x1080, etc). However, if you have a player that upscales and its scaler is better than the one in the display, you will see a benefit in the form of an improved picture (but it will usually be subtle, not a night/day difference).
hope you tried reprogramming the DVD player. These days you have to program everything before you can get a decent picture and sound. The better Plasmas (read more expensive) have much greater programming to acomodate various picture formats, and the capability to zoom, too.Stu
It is frustrating on some discs that the machines insist on doing something stupid.
The Plasma TV's menus are created to SELL TVs! not help the end user.
So nothing can be done to manually adjust the stinkin picture.
The Denon is a bit better.. but still not perfect.
I am limited to Full, Zoom, stretch, and zoom/stretch combo.
Why couldn't they make a percentage menu? or something intelligent?
"Is it possible that with new current components it might be impossible to display DVD images in the correct aspect ratio? "It's possible if the equipment wasn't designed intellegently. I've got a 4 year old Toshiba rear projection unit that can do straigh 4:3 or 16:9. If you don't like 4:3 that leave empty bands at the sides you can choose two different ways of stretching it or simply expand it but loose the bottom and top. I accept the bands on the sides. This isn't all that hard if you only RTFM.
Where it gets irritating is some DVD releases, particularly of the letterbox variety, don't seem to look right, either squished or stretched no matter what you do. Since this is not universal and since it seems to be a problem more with older issues (transfered from available film copies), I've concluded the fault lies with the DVD trnsfer. I hope that when NTSC finaaly dies a long overdue death, the problem will diminish.
Hi thereI'm curious: why send a 4:3 picture from the DVD player to the 16:9 screen? Why not setup the DVD player to send a 16:9 picture, and be done with it?
Regards -- Gerard
Hi Gerard,I realized after my post that I was wrong about the image from the DVD player being 4:3. Many or most DVDs are "letterbox" format and a larger ratio than 4:3. The effect we noticed in every case, though, with several DVDs, was horizontal stretching of the image when displayed on the 16:9 screen.
Not sure if we tried setting the DVD player to send 16:9, but thought we'd tried everything. Thanks for the suggestion. We'll have another go at it in a day or two and I'll report back.
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