>> Now that my mum has a widescreen TV, this means that I can either have
>> people with elliptical heads, huge black bars, or cut off half the
>> picture. I opted for cutting off half the picture. (Which means that if
>> they show something that *is* widescreen letterboxed, it comes out
>> right. Except that, apparently, even "widescreen" films aren't actually
>> 16:9 aspect, so you still get letterboxing...)
> 
> Well, there's a range of movie aspect ratios, the "shortest" of which matches up
> to the standard tv ratio (is that 16:9?). The wider format will indeed be
> letterboxed even on a widescreen tv, although to a much lesser degree. You may
> also have a 'zoom' setting (again, for movies), which will fill the screen
> vertically and cut off a very small area of picture at the sides.
> 
> I must admit, the ability of widescreen TVs to automatically format the picture
> is very variable. My current TV seems quite happy to side-bar, letterbox etc
> depending on the signal, and only very occasionally seems to get confused, but
> older CRT widescreens often were incapable of getting the ratio right without
> manual intervention... :)

Most TVs I see either have the whole picture distorted, or they have 
that "magic mode" that's supposed to fix the picture, but doesn't. It 
makes it so that stuff in the center looks OK, but stuff near the edges 
is horribly distorted.

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