How do you view 4:3 content?
 

I was visiting a friend over New Year's. We were watching a show, and we kept telling the owner of the house that the picture was distorted. He insisted that it wasn't, because a technician had spent several hours setting the whole A/V system up properly, and therefore nothing could be distorted.

Which leads, kind of, to my question: when the broadcast content is standard definition/4:3, how do you view it? I can't stand distortion, so I keep the original ratio and leave the bars on the sides.

I try not to view it, for starters...almost everything I watch is available in widescreen. But if there's no choice, columns it is.

I will say, when a show uses a 16:9 source and then letterboxes IT to 4:3, I die a little inside seeing it on my widescreen like that...in fact, usually I just turn it off.

I live in Japan, so almost all of what I watch is from the 'net. I take it how it comes, bars top & bottom, bars left & right, or none. I hate distortion! Fortunately I have stupid fast internet, so I can usually watch HD streaming with no buffering.

I stretch 4:3 content. Distortion doesn't bother me. I don't notice it. Black bars annoy the shit out of me. I'd rather zoom in on the image and lose the sides than see black bars on my monitor/TV.

I try to watch in 4:3 with bars, but its annoying switching between aspects when I change channels, and if it's zoomed in, sometimes I don't realize it.
Ditto.

Really? Damn.

I even have to have my 2.35:1 releases letterboxed on my 16:9 or it bugs me.

I'm still getting by on the old 4:3 crt television. When I do get high def, though, I'll be letterboxing where appropriate. Aspect ratios need to be preserved.

This.

I watch 4:3 with bars. It doesn't really bother me that much. We're still mid-transition.

What bothers me is when there's SD content on TV that's presented in 16:9, but shrunk, so I have to go fiddling with the settings on my HDTV so it will grow to the correct size. My TV doesn't even really get it quite right, it's a bit of a pain. I don't know why my cable unit doesn't do the job automatically.

ugh, i hate hate hate distortion and artifacts. Skogafoss hates tape and transmission damage.

and yes, watching something intended as 70MM or anamorphic widescreen and just scrunched just kills me.

Bars, Bars, Bars, Bars. I don't care if they are on the left or right.

You know what pisses me off more than willravel's upconversions???? The strechoconversions they do for sports, where the center is fine, but as they get to the edges they distory. Annoying.

The Food Network does this all the time. It looks the worst when they do a slow pan over something, and everything stretches and shrinks. Yuck.

I've been pro-bars since widescreen DVD's have been available. 4:3 Full Screen/"Pan & scan" is just so BAD, and I almost always notice the faux 'camera moves'.

I always watch 4:3 with the bars unless I'm visiting someone's house. More often than not, people will stretch the image, which bothers me immensely, but I bite my tongue.

Having worked in photography and digital imaging, I can't stand distorted images....watching people with their big fat heads. It's a shame. It's "widescreen" not "stretchscreen." I'd rather they crop out the top and bottom than stretch it.

I bet you can't guess how I watch it.

^^ Easy, you don't. That's cause you put your fist through the monitor/TV as soon as you discover it's letterbox instead of widescreen.

I use the columns. I have always had a soft spot for letterbox.

By the way, I was curious, and apparently the column version of letterbox is "pillarboxing", and the unfortunate event I referred to in my post with black space on all four sides is "windowboxing"

Most people can't tell a difference when 4:3 is stretched out sadly enough.

I go black bars or I don't watch it period.

I use 14:9 to watch 4:3 on my 16:9 television.

I loose a bit of the top and bottom of the image but it's much larger on the screen without the distortion.

Stoned?

With your head up your ass?

I voted stretched because I don't watch TV. When I do, i really don't care what it looks like and I will not pay an extra 15$ a month for 5-10 channels extra.

Also: I have a plasma tv. So burns can happen on the sidebars if left there long enough.

When I do watch tv(streamed)/movies(blu or upscaled), It is always on HD 16:9 through my ps3.

QFT - I've gotten into friend and/or family arguments over whether something is distorted or not. I'd even wager to say that at least 50% of America can't tell if something is actually 4:3 but stretched to 16:9.

The last time it was a huge ordeal for me was over at a friend's house - we were watching a comedy and it was clearly 4:3, but it was being stretched to 16:9 on their widescreen TV. I was about to die the entire time and eventually I had to bring it up. Then everyone in the entire room waged Holy War against me saying it wasn't stretched.

I know people who's CRTs were damaged and had green or purple spots on the edges, and they didn't notice it EVER.

Many people can't tell the difference. I used to tune people's TVs with reference discs so that they could see the problems, but I eventually just stopped because it was too much work for me and they obviously didn't notice or care.

Seriously, 1/3 of the screen, originating from the corner, being green or purple, usually the sign of someone hitting it on that corner in some manner. They just didn't see it.

maybe lots of people think normal people look stretched or sportsmen or 'wider' than everyone else. It irks me - i have to watch stuff with black bits.

The black bits irk me more than a stretched image.

What irks me more are wide formatted movies that STILL have black bars on a 16:9 screen. There is no excuse for that.

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Actually, there is.

Standard definition television is produced, naturally, in 4:3; feature films, on the other hand, are usually in either 1.85:1 (37:20, when expressed as an integer ratio) or occasionally 2.39:1 (~12:5). 16:9 was chosen as the high definition format because it's the most efficient aspect ratio that accommodates all the others -- in other words, it's the format that wastes the least amount of screen space for any of the common aspect ratios.

Hypothetically, anything other than actual high definition television programming should be letterboxed to some extent, but in practice the film producers frequently crop the image to fit your screen.

What would you prefer instead? Vertical stretching or losing part of the frame? Letterboxing, stretching, or cropping are your only options for cinema aspect ratio films.

I'd rather lose a fraction of an inch on each side than see a narrow-ass picture on my already wide screen.

Damn, I thought I'd covered every available option. Sorry, Charlatan.

Also, I'm worried that my thread title is excluding some of the population that doesn't know what 4:3 means. Ah well.

Can you get 14:9 in the US? As I understand it, 14:9 is a UK standard that was created as a compromise. I find it works very well unless there are supers at the very bottom of the screen. Most things are framed above that threshold though. I recommend it to those who can't stand the distortion of "zoom" or "justified".

I've never seen or heard about 14:9.

I'd like to see it just so that I can comment...

but if we adopt it, we're not going to put U in color, flavor, either. :P

Here's a BBC primer on aspect ratios: LINK

To be honest, I hadn't heard of it until about 6-8 months ago. We received some masters for broadcast in 14:9 and it turned out that we could accept them as they were 4:3 safe. Then, when I bought a new TV last July 14:9 was available in my menu of aspect ratios to use.

If you watch TV in anything other than the projected aspect ratio or if you prefer pan&scan to letterboxed movies, you are objectively wrong and probably the type of person to order your steak well done and put ketchup on it.

I hadn't heard of 14:9 before, but now that I have I understand why a bunch of Cartoon Network's SD programming is leterboxed slightly

I forgot to note, that I will only watch Widescreen DVDs. Anything marked as Fullscreen is discounted heavily as a waste of time.

I like the idea for the 14:9, seems like a great compromise. The state of TV here in the US is just utter crap as far as standards are concerned. We're doing it like we do everything, letting the standards work themselves out and well.... that means we'll probably never have any standard.

I do always order my steak and burgers well done and I do like ketchup on it sometimes, so I guess your description is accurate.

Jesus, you all know a lot about TV's and aspect ratio's. Perhaps someone can help me understand this, because this is all new to me as of last week when we bought a 36 inch LCD.

There are some channels that have the black bar's on the side, I'm okay with that, I do notice the distortions on stretch, so I leave it rather than switching to wide screen. And I there are some "HD" channels that look great and the entire 36 inches of the TV. There's two things that don't make sense to me:

1. I can filter scrolling through channels by category, and if I filter "HD", only a handful take up the entire screen, most still have black bars on the side. I thought all "HD" shows should fit on entirely on the HD tv?

2. And much more annoying - there's a handful of channels that maintain the black bars on the side when you flip to them, but on top of that horizontal bars appear on the top and bottom. So the picture is the same exact shape as the TV but 4 inches cut off on either side, and probably 3 on the top and bottom as well. Does anyone else have this problem? With a relatively small TV at 36", these channels are virtually unwatchable at any distance. But otherwise the picture looks great if you get out of bed and walk right up to it

Where are you? Standards vary by region.

The idea of 'HDTV' is still somewhat nebulous. There are two dominant resolutions in North America (720p and 1080i); if your television is set to display pixel-for-pixel rather than upscale, a 720p image will have a black border on all sides on a 1080 display. In addition, HDTV channels may not necessarily broadcast in high definition throughout the entire day. It's not uncommon for a network to broadcast non-primetime programming in standard definition to conserve bandwidth.

I'm wondering, though, how a 36" television could be considered small in any context.

He said "relatively small." Compared to sets at 50" and above, I suppose that's small.

At 36", his set is a third larger than mine, but I don't even consider mine "small." I'd call that more of a "standard" or "regular" size. I wouldn't call something small until it was 20" or smaller.

According to Best Buy, matthew should be just under 8 feet away for optimal viewing distance.