Artikel over WS vs P&S in USA Today

[J.A.F._Doorhof]

Watching wide-screen DVDs on a square tube

To judge from the hottest current topic in my e-mail, most readers of this column would rather not look at or despise or are made crazy by the black bars that appear above and below a wide-screen DVD picture on a conventional, squarish television screen. But while television manufacturers feel your pain, their cheerful counsel is to bear up, acknowledge that we're in a transition to a wide-screen world and meanwhile try to live with a few Band-Aid solutions.

In case you haven't yet wheeled a wide-screen rear-projection set into your living room, the root of this widely shared consternation is as old as trying to pound square pegs into round holes. Only in this case, it's shoving a rectangular picture into a nearly square frame. It sort of works but not that well.

Calculating the ratios

The new breed of wide-screen televisions springs from a key protocol for high-definition digital broadcasting — that the image is to suggest the shape of a movie screen. Where the width-to-height ratio of a current television-broadcast picture is 1.33:1, the new image will be 1.78:1. That's not quite as wide as the 1.85:1 commonly seen in films, and not nearly so expansive as the 2.35:1 format known as Panavision.

Just so everybody's on the same page, which is not always easy to manage with the television industry, note that manufacturers always have referred to 1.33:1 as the simpler expression 4:3, or four-by-three. But the new 1.78:1 doesn't convert so neatly as something-to-three; instead, the wide-screen ratio is reduced to 16:9, or 16-by-9. At least this will let you keep up with a salesperson's chatter about old-look and new-look screens.

But mastering the geometry doesn't make it any easier to deal with watching images that don't fit the screen. Not only do wide-screen (or "letterbox") images leave black bars at the top and bottom of a conventional screen, but normal broadcasts (or movies on VHS tape) projected onto a 16:9 screen also leave vertical bars on each side of the picture. What to do?

"We really don't see it as a problem," said Zenith's John Taylor. "This is a transition period, and our wide-screen sets are designed to provide a variety of solutions."

The most common "solution" for making a 4:3 image fill a 16:9 screen is electronic zoom. In effect, this means the picture is brought forward until it matches up with the screen width. But that means losing a strip off the top and bottom of the image. If you don't zoom a 4:3 image on a wide-screen set, you must content yourself with glowing gray bars on each side of the centered image.

Understanding glowing bars

Glowing, not black. "The biggest concern we've found among consumers is the uneven screen burn-in that may result when only part of the screen is used for displaying a picture," Taylor said. "That's why we provide illuminating gray bars."

Toshiba's Scott Ramirez said his company tries to nip the image-to-screen mismatch in the bud by encouraging consumers (and sales people) to consider how they're going to use their television before making the purchase.

"Even if you're buying a high-definition set, you have a choice of 4:3 and 16:9," Ramirez said. "If you mostly watch wide-screen movies on DVD or you plan to focus your TV viewing on HD programs, a wide-screen set makes sense. If most of your viewing will be standard 4:3, maybe that's the kind of set you should buy."

But Ramirez also notes that the industry is moving swiftly toward 16:9 as the retail standard. Last year, he said, about 30% of all rear-projection sales — including 60% of high-definition digital models — were in widescreen. In 2002, the percentage of wide-screen sales is expected to jump to 60%; at the same time, 80% of high-definition sales are likely to be in wide-screen models.

Perhaps not so far down the road, images and screens will line up once more and we'll all be looking at something like cinema in our living rooms. And nettlesome black bars and quaint old square pictures will have vanished together.

[J.A.F._Doorhof]

Zolang er in Amerika een keuze is tussen 4:3 of 16:9 TV's dan is er denk ik geen hoop.
Ze kiezen gewoon de grootste en dat is 4:3..... slik.

Hoef ik mijn masking systeem in de toekomst niet meer te gebruiken ?

MvrGr.
Frank

[Sum1]

Als een titel niet in Original Aspectect Ratio wordt uitgebracht, moet het wel heel raar gaan voor ik 'm ga kopen...

No OAR, no Sale!  

[J.A.F._Doorhof]

Ligt aan de prijs, ik heb verschillende supergoedkope DVD's gekocht waar het me niet kan schelen wat de AR is.

Maar als ik full-price of boven de € 10,00 ga betalen dan is het OAR.

MvrGr.
Frank