Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Dumb question about widescreen TV's

I frequently see widescreen TV's broadcasting non-widescreen TV shows. The TV compensates by stretching out the picture horizontally, so everything looks fat. Can you set the TV to add vertical bars on the sides to make the picture normal?

Yes; most if not all newer sets allow for aspect ratio changes from 4:3 (adds sidebars) to whatever flavor of widescreen aspect you want.

It's typically a simple push of a button on a remote...

my tv has the ability to change the aspect ratio from widescreen to normal. It just is black on the edges when it is on "normal"

In fact, on my new TV (46" Toshiba DLP), 4:3 is the default with the annoying-ass bars on the side. And everytime I change inputs (which I do probably several times a day between the TiVO, the DVD, and the Consoles), I have to change the thing back to 16:9 widescreen. It's highly annoying.

Frankly I'd MUCH rather watch a little bit of stretched TV than deal with those annoying bars. Kinda kills the point of buying such a nice, big TV when you don't even use 25% of it.

My 30" Toshiba has the bars on the sides. I didn't realize it at first, because I had the aspect ratio set to 16:9 (but chopping off the top and bottom of the screen), but I can't change the bars on the side to anything other than WHITE.

It's very annoying, at least for me. The wife doesn't care. I wish I had figured this out while I still had the option to return in. Shame though.. because the picture is nice otherwise.

my sony has a pretty good widescreen stretch mode - the vertical bars on 4:3 programming doesn't particularly bother me but it drives my wife nuts, so we leave it on the stretched mode all the time. works well; the only time it looks funky to me is if you're watching an HGTV-type show and they pan around a small room - the distortion becomes pretty visible at that point and everything gets kind of fish-eyed, but beyond that it's rarely noticeable.

Our main TV is widescreen. When something widescreen comes on, I switch it. Most Gamecube games have a widescreen option too, which is cool.

When it's in normal 4:3 mode, and widescreen stuff comes on, there are black bars on the sides and top and bottom until I stretch that beyatch out.

Heh, I've found a lot of people would rather have the picture stretched out than look at the bars... a friend of mine is like that. Personally, the fat-mode bugs the hell out of me

Related to this... I have a widescreen laptop that I play games on. It stretches them width wise, but since it's a game, I really don't notice until I take a screen shot. It comes out 4:3 and looks really weird since I'm used to it being stretched.

Oh well!

The xbox has the ability to be widescreen as well. I didn't like things being streched at first but then you get used to it. It is weird though, after watching movies on HDTV and then going back to a "regualar" tv you wonder "I thought that was a clear picture?"