Charlie Brooker hits one of my little frustrations right on the head today,
I tend to assume other people share my obsessive need to examine the settings until everything is just so, and get genuinely enraged when I go to someone’s house and discover, say, that they’re watching programmes in the wrong aspect ratio. People over 50 are the worst offenders: they’ll blithely sit through a Dad’s Army repeat that is unnaturally stretched across the screen so that the entire cast look as if they had difficult births that left them with flattened skulls. Faced with this, I get acute back-seat-driver anxiety, and end up hectoring them like an exasperated pilot trying to teach a four-year-old how to fly a helicopter.
It’s not just the aspect ratio, when I go back home shows are being watched in standard def even when they are being broadcast in HD on the next channel and we are paying for the luxury of Sky HD. That’s not as bad as watching a whole nights TV with squashed or stretched heads but still makes me wonder why they pay for it.
The exception to the over 50 rule is my brother who couldn’t care less and is oblivious to picture quality. I’ve caught him watching analogue terrestrial with black bars (put on by the broadcaster for 4:3 correction) stretched across the 16:9 LCD. Ouch.
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Lol - this so reminds me of my parents! For the most part, it doesnt actually bother me that much, but when you’re obviously losing some of the picture, that’s when i can’t cope!
I agree with John here - I hate watching short, fat people on television. Andy - I’d rather lose some of the picture (for example by cropping out some of a 4:3 picture to view in 14:9 or 16:9 on a widescreen TV) than stretch the picture one way or another - it looks horrible!
That said, I think cheap widescreen TVs are partly to blame, as they don’t always have the capabilities to easily switch between aspect ratios.
Yeh Chris the “fake widescreen” TVs used to do this alot. They are using a modern HDTV though so there’s no excuse
And I totally agree about the cropping. I am going back through Seinfeld again (4:3) and cropping it to 16:9 so it looks great on my projector (better than stretching or leaving native). Some TVs have a nice feature that is basically a half and half approach which does slight cropping and then stretches on the extreme edges.