Tag Archive for 'TV'

Change the Aspect Ratio!

Published
by
John Griffin
on January 22, 2008
in TV and Tech
. 3 Comments

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.

The iPhone. No 16:9, No Deal.

Published
by
John Griffin
on January 19, 2007
in TV and Tech
. 0 Comments

When Steve Jobs proudly proclaimed the iPhone was widescreen we all assumed he meant real widescreen aka 16:9 aka what you get on all TVs. Finally the ability to watch TV shows in their native aspect ratio without letter-boxing or cropping.

As it turns out after a little investigation over at Cnet’s Crave the iPhone actually has an aspect ratio of 1.5:1, putting it firmly in proprietary, non-standard family of screens. Why do we have to keep going through this? Its been hard enough controlling content and displays in the move to 16:9, so why can’t Apple who are overlords of all the content and all the displays on their platform get it right?

It really pisses me off when these manufacturers flaunt the standards and formats in place by just completely ignoring them and doing their own thing. When you say widescreen you better mean it instead of fobbing us off with this half arsed attempt, hell even Sony can do it. Do you really want to become more notorious than Sony for this sort of thing?

Until we get a proper, true, authentic widescreen iPod with decent battery life and a larger storage capacity this is a non starter. No sale Apple!

[via Engadget]