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.
