DJSkyler.com

So I was at a sports bar this last Fat Tuesday. They had five nice new HDTV sets tuned to different stations, all displaying something like this:

Do you see anything wrong with these pictures? No, I don’t mean the people in them, the images are distorted!

These images were filmed in the old television aspect ratio of 1.33:1 (which just means that the picture is one unit high to every 1 and 1/3 unit long). But new HDTV sets have an aspect ratio of 1.77:1 (the extra .44 means a wider screen). So this sports bar is using the stretch feature on their HDTV’s to fit the 1.33:1 feeds onto their 1.77:1 screens. This expands the picture unnaturally, making everyone shorter and wider.

And this practice is driving me nuts. I see it in bars, in stores and worst of all, in people’s homes. I don’t know if people don’t undertand the distortion principle at work here or if they don’t care and just want to fill their new wide TV screens.

The proper way to watch a 1.33:1 feed on a widescreen TV would look like this:

Yes, this results in black bars on the sides of the screen. But this is the only way to see the full original picture without distortion.

However, there is a way to fill your widescreen TV with a standard ratio picture without distortion. So the original video image is shaped like this:

Don’t use the widescreen mode on this feed, use the Zoom mode instead (at least that’s what my Philips HDTV calls it). By zooming in on the picture, you trim the top and bottom off instead of making it weirdly stretched out:

Compare that with what you would get in stretch mode ~ a SmushMummy!:

I prefer watching the full original picture myself, but I hope this demonstrates how inappropriately using the stretch mode turns your TV into a funhouse mirror. Please use this knowledge to educate your friends so that this tragedy can be stopped. I’m certain that Stretchy-vision could lead to brain damage. It certainly is giving me a headache.