got a big widescreen - need a little help

[kennydoe]

...so it was 'Super Bowl TV Sale' week last week. even though I just bought a 42" plasma screen 3 weeks ago, i was looking thru the ads in the paper. A local store was selling a Panasonic 61" LCD for $1388. I couldn't NOT buy it.

It's a mammoth for sure - the picture is great - not quite as great as the Plasma, but it's 61"!!!

Anyway, on to my question...and it's about BOTH sets. They're both widescreen, obviously...all my DVDs are widescreen and I've been putting up with the black bars on the top & bottom on my regular TVs for years. I was looking forward to the DVD picture taking up the whole screen, but it doesn't - i'm still looking at black bars above and below the picture.

Stuff shot in HD, such as sporting events, etc uses the whole screen, but my DVDs do not. What's up with that? Is there a way to make it work?

There's an "ASPECT" button on the remote that scrolls thru a bunch of different picture sizes, but when i get the full screen, the picture looks squashed and sometimes pixellated.. Is there a setting i don't know about?

HELP!
~K

PS: Both sets are Panasonic

[S-man]

Both the TV AND the DVD player need to be set to widescreen/fullscreen.

[davester1234]

Whenever I have questions like these, I ask Glen!

I think in the end, the problem is that some DVD's are shot in a different aspect ratio then your widescreen TV. Hence, you see the black bars. From what I understand, its sometimes inevitable.

Some DVD's won't show the bars, others will. That's the way my setup works anyway.


If you stretch the picture to fit, you'll be losing a touch of quality.

[jemsite]

yup, some dvd movies are shot with an aspect ratio much wider than your tv, so you'll still see black bars

2.35:1 vs 1.78:1 (hdtv) vs 1.3:1 (old tv).

on movies like wizard of oz and casablanca you'd have bars on the SIDE obviously since those are not widescreen

other thing like posted above you need to make sure you're in the right mode and not squeezing down a widescreen show... glen

[voodoo_child]

Pretty much ALL movies are shot in a wider aspect ratio than your tv - when they're mastering them down to DVD they either give you the whole picture (in which case you'll have black bars top and bottom, or using the trickery on your tv to stretch it), or chop the sides off.

[jemsite]

BTW - Kenny what you posted is the bane of movie affecanados... it's the sole reason why HBO-HD and Cinemax-HD and ShowtimeHD show films CROPPED so "no black bars" appear when in fact they're needed to present the movie as originally filmed. now presented in Butch-o-vision.

also if you watch UniversalHD they go the other way with stretch-o-vision to fill the screen so the average person doesn't call and complain "why are there black bars". ugh... glen

[Carlo]

fortunately Star Wars didn't get the same treatment when they aired on CinemaxHD, if I remember correctly :-)

But I'll take stretched and cropped over standard definition anyday though.

I'm still starting to really hate Cablevision though. I don't seem to get Food Network HD, National Geographic HD, and a bunch of other channels...****in blows :-(

[S-man]

It's actually pan and scan more than cropped.

[jemsite]

pan/scan involves cropping on both sides and sometimes zooming in.

cinemax/hbo had StarWars as OAR (original aspect ratio for ep1, 3, 4-6) and in DD5.1.

to me it's always OAR first and foremost... glen

[S-man]

Amen. I think that the "standards" need to be more consistant somehow.

I think they are supposed to be for broadcasted stuff. I am by no means an expert. But I do have some expieriance with HD, Aspect ratios etc.

I'd rather watch OAR, even with the Bars top and bottom like Starwars. I think Starwars looks good. I have the DVD with OAR.

[jemsite]

honestly, except for open-matte, if it's not OAR i won't even watch a film.

pan/scan/cropping is akin to the old 45 singles trimming down the real songs from the album. people need to grasp that and hold on to it *ahem kenny* ...glen

[kennydoe]

I dug into the menus on my DVD player, as S-Man suggested, and found that there was indeed a setting change to made for the video output. I changed it to 16:9 widescreen and the problem is *mostly* better.

a couple of the DVDS have much smaller black bars and the others take up the whole screen, which is magnificent.

My only issue now is that when watching HDTV channels it's full screen thru cablevision, but it's got bars going thru the DVD player. Not a big deal...just don't understand why that is.

~Kenny