Um, sure, your TV's really great!

April 16, 2008 12:07 PM

Every flat-panel TV I've watched at other folks' houses or in showrooms seems to me to be distorting DVD movies; they always looked slightly stretched horizontally.

The few time I've asked for the controls or been shown them, there hasn't appeared to be any way to fine-tune this, just a couple of aspect-ratio choices, of which we're watching the supposedly "best" one, but to me looks awful. (I've got an HD tube TV and use it only for DVDs; its aspect-ratio settings look great: circles are circles!) Am I seeing things, or are my friends in denial about their shiny new boxes? If I'm right, what's wrong with these flat panel gismos, anyway?

posted by dpcoffin to media & arts (18 comments total)

Widescreen displays have a mode called "stretch" or something similar. It's intended to take a 4:3 image and stretch it to fill all available space on a 16:9 screen. The result is what you're describing. There is a setting somewhere in the config menus that lets you turn it off. Some people aren't bothered by it. It drives me nuts.
posted by pandanom at 12:10 PM on April 16, 2008

They're probably watching older "full frame" DVDs -- full frame is in quotes because it represents the old TV frame, not the aspect ratio of the new widescreen TVs. Specifically, a DVD needs to be a widescreen DVD.

Because those old "full frame" DVDs use the old 4:3 ratio, they look stretched when watched on a widescreen TV, unless you change the apect ratio setting to 4:3 on the TV. There are then black bars around the sides of the image. Some people prefer the stretched widescreen look to the "windowboxed" look, so they just leave their TV on fullscreen all the time.

Most newer DVDs are widescreen, and should indeed look normal on all HDTVs as long as the DV player and TV are set up. Still, some "full frame" DVDs are sold; the trick is just to avoid those.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 12:14 PM on April 16, 2008

Er, I meant to say they leave their TV on widescreen all the time, even when there's a 4:3 source.
posted by I EAT TAPAS at 12:15 PM on April 16, 2008

I'm guessing at two possibilities: first, their DVD players are in 4:3 mode, and the TV is stretching that to 16:9 (making things more squat); or second, they're stretching 1.85:1 or 2.35:1 content to fill their 1.78:1 screens (this ought to cause things to be taller, not squatter).

A properly-configured DVD player (or set-top box) into a properly-configured 16:9 screen should show no distortion.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:15 PM on April 16, 2008

I'm definitely not talking about the extreme effect of "FF" (4:3) dvds being incorrectly shown in "WS" (16:9) mode, to use Blockbuster's terminology. I mean WS disks looking even wider and shorter (subtle, but obvious to me) when seen on a flat panel. I just did some traveling and encountered this in each home I visited that had a new flat TV.

Is there some other place on most of these TVs to "properly configure" this, besides the obvious aspect-ratio controls for playing back individual disks?
posted by dpcoffin at 12:24 PM on April 16, 2008

I can only answer one of your questions: no, you're not seeing things, because I've had the same experience after shifting from a tube-based HD TV to a flat screen. It also bothers me, so I'll be watching this thread for help. As you say just above (OP) it's not a matter of so-called full screen vs. widescreen, it happens specifically with widescreen DVDs.
posted by Rain Man at 12:46 PM on April 16, 2008

I can't count the number of times I've been to people's houses and they talk about how good HD looks on their new flat panel. It turns out they just stuck the cable directly into the back of their television and they are watching the exact same channels they watched before, now all blown up and stretched. For my good friends, I'll go through and set things up right and show them some QAM channels if they have the right tuner in their television. For everyone else, I just nod "Yes" politely.
posted by AaRdVarK at 12:49 PM on April 16, 2008

As mentioned: the amount of laziness/ignorance about this in retail establishment displays (and friends' houses) is pretty astounding. There are settings on both the DVD player (or other input device) and the TV. A properly configured setup (which is not that hard, people!) will display a proper picture, free of distoration, stretchiness, egg-shaped circles, and elongated ear cartilidge.

However, some people purposely stretch a non-widescreen picture to fill the frame. Some people just like to fill their frame; they know it's not right, but they like it. That's fine. Live and let live.

Others might do so to prevent burn-in on a projection TV that can result from viewing non-stretched 4:3 shows. (My 5 year old rear-projection TV now suffers from this).

But, some other people are indeed absolutely in denial. No amount of explanation will convince them that the picture is wrong, because they take it to mean you are suggesting the TV is inferior to their old one, instead of seeing the truth that the settings are wrong. These people can not be reasoned with. Leave them alone. Remove them from your MySpace and FaceBook friends list. Do not follow them on Twitter. Block them from all online chat programs. Most importantly, do not go to their house to watch a movie.

But the basic answer is: no, that's not how it's supposed to look.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 12:52 PM on April 16, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]

I've seen a similar thing in some hd vs dvd comparisons online, but ascribed it to different encodes or to one picture being scaled and the other not.

If it's real, it's probably just tube and flat panels doing overscan slightly differently. Or sometimes, flat panels not overscanning at all. Our Westinghouse doesn't overscan on hdmi inputs unless you tell it to.

Alternately, any real effect you see could be caused by different scaling/expansion methods to fill out the 16:9 image from the anamorphic 4:3 image on the dvd -- calculating new pixels versus just expanding the electron beam line, or some such.

Unless you've measured, though, it's an open question which is more accurate. If you're used to seeing a slightly too-tall picture on the tube tv, a correct picture on a flat panel might well appear to be squished to you.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 12:58 PM on April 16, 2008

I think you're seeing things, or all the flat panel TVs you've seen are not setup correctly.

I play DVDs via my MCE box (connected via DVI) and they look exactly the same as they do on my Oppo DVD player, aspect ratio-wise.

Are you seeing the same effect playing DVDs on your computer LCD?
posted by mphuie at 1:23 PM on April 16, 2008

Go into the electronics department at Target and wait for the Target logo to come on. Out of the ten or so TVs on display, maybe 2 will actually show it round. (In my experience.)

So, those who are saying it's a setting/it's not that hard/you fix it for your friends...care to elaborate?
posted by sageleaf at 2:52 PM on April 16, 2008

Go into the electronics department at Target and wait for the Target logo to come on.

That's exactly when I noticed how widespread this problem is. As the OP said, it's not a dramatic 4:3 being stretched, which I doubt anyone would tolerate for long, it's something much more subtle, maybe a 5-10 percent distortion.

I have no idea what "common" mis-setting this could be either, but I'm answering the "no, you're not imagining this" part of the question.

You could always watch the TV from a 5-degree angle instead of straight on. :)
posted by rokusan at 4:24 PM on April 16, 2008

Pet hate of mine, so I will elaborate: read the manual for the telly and for the DVD player. Find out where the aspect ratio is on the remotes for the telly and for the DVD player. Keep pressing the buttons 'til the picture looks right. Sometimes having both devices set to 16:9 will work, sometimes it won't. In that case, keep pressing. The TV will more than likely have a setting that will inflate a widescreen movie inside a 4:3 picture so that it displays correctly on a 16:9 screen. Mine has a "movie expand" setting.

Generally you will want to adjust the DVD picture first and adjust the TV if that doesn't work. For the DVD with a widescreen movie in 4:3 you will need to find the right setting for the telly.
posted by Tixylix at 4:27 PM on April 16, 2008

care to elaborate?

Hell, I could walk into any of the dozen stores of the two biggest home electronics specialist retailers in my city and see near enough the same ratio. It's not that hard, no, but if the damn things are going to walk out the door anyway just because they're flat and wide, why bother?

Interestingly, when they were still selling WS CRTs, they were almost always correctly configured. I have my own theory about that; that because the shape / layout of a CRT is the same as their existing TV, people will recognise when it looks wrong - but a LCD or plasma, which has a subtly but totally different look (e.g. all screen, thin border, no large/obvious control area, and usually with the colour wound right up to distract from the relative lack of contrast), people will mindlessly accept stretching/distortion as right for that type of screen.

People don't think as much as you might think they do...

Anecdote: I was getting my car serviced a few months ago, and the obviously stretched image on the plasma in the courtesy lounge annoyed the hell out of me. The remote was sitting on top on the screen, so I "fixed" it - the source was OTA analogue so 4:3 only, but I changed it from just straight stretch to one of the less annoying WS stretch modes. 30 minutes later, when the rep came to get me, the first words out of his mouth were "why's the TV gone all funny?"

Some people will get used to almost anything...
posted by Pinback at 4:38 PM on April 16, 2008

A properly configured setup (which is not that hard, people!) will display a proper picture, free of distoration, stretchiness, egg-shaped circles, and elongated ear cartilidge.

OK, so the variables are: type of DVD, settings on the DVD player, settings on the TV. Anyone care to explain how to make the adjustments to get the perfect circle?

MeFites await enlightenment...
posted by exphysicist345 at 6:48 PM on April 16, 2008

I'm sort of surprised that more dvd/blu-ray players don't automatically detect the source and the display and adjust the signal accordingly. My ps3 does it, which is nice...since we specifically bought a widescreen flat panel.

However, the magnavox upscale dvd player we had first didn't. I had to set the upscale AND the display manually BEFORE a disc was in the tray. What was NUTS was that if I chose "widescreen" to play a "widescreen" dvd on my "widescreen" TV, it would actually put sidebars above AND below AND beside the image, because it somehow thought it had to put the bars there for my square tv.

I never actually did find a setting that worked for every dvd. Some stretched, some did whatever they did. Now I've got the ps3 and it does it for me.

They could fix the problem by doing lots of things, but PROBABLY by setting the output from whatever their source is. Problem is that one source controls every single display, and they're not all the same, so some will always look furchtbar. They could most likely fix this well enough by pressing ZOOM on the TV's that are distorted. Better to lose a little of the edges that make people say "ZOMG THAT TV ARE BUSTAD."

This is why places like Rex/Best-Buy always have like-displays on like-sources and they pay people to fix the color saturation and whatnot. WalMart/Sams/Target really don't care.
posted by TomMelee at 7:22 PM on April 16, 2008

Anyone care to explain how to make the adjustments to get the perfect circle?

Trial and error. Especially since it seems every manufacturer has a different name for the various settings.
posted by Fuzzy Skinner at 7:23 PM on April 16, 2008

You might want to read up on Anamorphic Widescreen, a technique used for automatically fitting widescreen images to whatever size tv they are played on. Also, as has been mentioned, widescreen formats vary from film to file. It might be 16:9, or 1.85:1, 2.35:1 or some other number which may or may not be displaying correctly on the 16:9 tv.
posted by blue_beetle at 9:19 PM on April 16, 2008