Monday, January 30, 2006

Narrowscreen Telly

Recently acquiring my first widescreen television has confirmed something I've suspected for some time. The majority of people these days seem to watch distorted TV where people's faces are stretched in width to fill the screen.

Of the formats available I tend to watch in 4:3 mode, which means a black border around the picture, which is actually smaller than on my old 4:3 telly, but at least it's in proportion.

The other option for viewing of normal television programming is the 4:3 zoom, which at least fills the screen more, but at the expense of losing some of the picture. And losing picture is exactly what I wanted to avoid with a widescreen TV.

So, what to choose? A stretched and distorted picture, a small picture, or less of a picture?

It seems to me that about the only advantage of widescreen televisions is when watching widescreen films :(