John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:

> >   Disadvantages of CRT:
> > 
> > - Energy consumption and heat production.

> I work in a local store, and when walking past the large screen 
> televisions, which are all LCD or plasma displays, I can feel the heat 
> rolling off of these things.  Even the smaller ones suck down a great 
> deal of power.

  Well, technically speaking I didn't claim that energy consumption is not
a problem with LCDs... :P

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> 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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Warp wrote:

>   Disadvantages of LCD:

> - Relatively poor contrast (but it's fastly getting there).

And brightness. (Although this tends to be more of a problem with small, 
portable displays. And since it's impossible to make a small, portable 
CRT display *at all*, I guess we can live with that.)

> - Often has limited color depth, requiring software dithering, which
>   reduces image quality.

My PC monitor has this. It's surprisingly annoying.

> - Dead pixels, which may be more annoying than the CRT distortions.

This seems to be very, very rare. I've only seen it on one or two LCD 
displays. [Including the one I'm using right now, BTW.] Well over 99% of 
the LCDs I've seen have no dead pixels at all.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> 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.

Oh yeah, I know the one you mean. Ghastly. Worse than regular stretching, IMO!

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Bill Pragnell wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> 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.
> 
> Oh yeah, I know the one you mean. Ghastly. Worse than regular stretching, IMO!

Damn straight!

I guess they figure all the "interesting" stuff will always be in the 
center of the image or something.

Still, no matter what you do, there is no way the problem can ever be 
solved without distortion or black bars. It's just mathematically 
impossible. Which is why I find it so puzzling that manufacturers have 
artificially created this problem in the first place...

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49f194db$1@news.povray.org...

> 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.

You're sure of that? I just bought a LCD (a 600? LG model, nothing fancy), 
and the remote has a neat "Ratio" button that lets me browse through a bunch 
of different formats so that I can pick the best one depending on the input 
(Internet, DVD, satellite etc.) and there's no distortion except when I 
choose 16:9 for a 4:3 input.

G.

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"Gilles Tran" <gil### [at] agroparistechfr> wrote:

> 49f194db$1@news.povray.org...
>
> > 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.
>
> You're sure of that? I just bought a LCD (a 600? LG model, nothing fancy),
> and the remote has a neat "Ratio" button that lets me browse through a bunch
> of different formats so that I can pick the best one depending on the input
> (Internet, DVD, satellite etc.) and there's no distortion except when I
> choose 16:9 for a 4:3 input.

Can't speak for The Invisible One, but I've only ever seen that non-uniform
distortion on widescreen CRTs.

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>>> 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.
>> You're sure of that? I just bought a LCD (a 600? LG model, nothing fancy),
>> and the remote has a neat "Ratio" button that lets me browse through a bunch
>> of different formats so that I can pick the best one depending on the input
>> (Internet, DVD, satellite etc.) and there's no distortion except when I
>> choose 16:9 for a 4:3 input.
> 
> Can't speak for The Invisible One, but I've only ever seen that non-uniform
> distortion on widescreen CRTs.

Lots of LCD TVs seem to have a "magnify" mode that stretches the sides 
so that the middle can be unstretched. It looks slightly less bad than 
unifirm stretching, but still no match for having a signal who's aspect 
ratio actually matches the screen.

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Still, no matter what you do, there is no way the problem can ever be 
> solved without distortion or black bars.

  You forgot the third option (which most widescreen TVs support): Zoom
the 4:3 image until it fits the 16:9 screen.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Still, no matter what you do, there is no way the problem can ever be 
>> solved without distortion or black bars.
> 
>   You forgot the third option (which most widescreen TVs support): Zoom
> the 4:3 image until it fits the 16:9 screen.

Ah yes, optio 3: cut off the edges. (Which means that any signal 
containing a 16:9 image padded to 4:3 aspect looks perfect, while normal 
4:3 has bits of the edges missing.)

This is the option I use on my mum's TV. Usually the missing parts 
aren't that important. (Although one still wonders why they created this 
problem to begin with...)

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