Warp wrote:

>   Well, I'm not saying you are one of those people (and I'm in fact
> assuming you aren't), but I have seen *way* too many people who vehemently
> deny seeing *anything* wrong *at all* in a 4:3 picture which has been
> stretched horizontally to cover the entire 16:9 screen area.

This is the best part of widescreen! :-D

You can choose between:

1. Black bars at the side of the screen. (I.e., all that extra screen 
area you just paid money for being completely unused.)

2. A stretched image where everybody has elliptical heads.

3. One of the various "zoom" modes which distorts the image non-linearly 
to supposedly give a better picture than a linear distortion.

4. Cut the top and/or bottom off the picture to make it fit.

Everybody seems to hate #1, but lots of people apparently see nothing 
wrong with #2 or #3. *shudders*

Post a reply to this message

> I can see the pixels on my monitor.

What dpi is it?  How far away are you from it?

> But yeah, maybe 600dpi would be overkill. Perhaps just 150 or something?

My laptop has a 150 dpi screen.  My desktop monitor is 103 dpi and from 
normal viewing at my desk (60 cm) I cannot see any jagged edges from the 
pixels (maybe that's just because of the AA settings though).  Maybe the 
fact that Windows is not good at scaling has meant that making a 150 or 200 
dpi monitor that is used from "desktop" viewing distances would be 
impossible to use due to the tiny physical size of the fonts and other GUI 
items?

> Hell, there are programs that ignore you if you change the default window 
> colours. Or programs that don't like it if Windows is installed on D: 
> rather than C:. ;-)

I was running it for a while on my laptop with a non-standard dpi setting. 
On the whole Windows and Office was fine, but IIRC my CAD software screwed 
up, with some buttons being shifted outside of the window so you couldn't 
get to them!

> (Then again, my grandparents use FreeSat. Their TV physically has a 4:3 
> aspect [it's an old CRT], and the picture seems to fit natively, so...)

Most stand alone sat/freeview boxes I've seen have an option to output to 
4:3 which just crops the left/right edges of the 16:9 signal (I assume if 
it's built into a TV it will be set accordingly to match the TV).  This is 
why they always put any important information in the central part of the 
screen, as they know some people are still chopping the sides off to watch 
4:3.

Post a reply to this message

Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> 1. Black bars at the side of the screen. (I.e., all that extra screen 
> area you just paid money for being completely unused.)

  And that's wrong because...?

> Everybody seems to hate #1

  I have been thinking about an explanation for that psychological phenomenon
for years, but come up with nothing. It still baffles me.

  Clearly I'm different than 99% of people. The stretching bothers me a
lot, but the black bars on the side not at all. This seems to be the exact
opposite of what those 99% of people feel. But why? I have no idea.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

> 2. A stretched image where everybody has elliptical heads.

Maybe it makes them feel better if everyone else looks fatter on TV :-)

Still interested to know where you're getting your 4:3 TV feed from that 
requires one of these "fixes".  Are you using a separate 
freeview/cable/satellite box?  That might be configured to 4:3 rather than 
16:9?

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> 1. Black bars at the side of the screen. (I.e., all that extra screen 
>> area you just paid money for being completely unused.)
> 
>   And that's wrong because...?

It's wrong that I should have to pay extra for a bunch of additional 
pixels that I'm never going to use.

However, if I've already paid that money, I'd rather see black bars than 
squashed heads.

>> Everybody seems to hate #1
> 
>   I have been thinking about an explanation for that psychological phenomenon
> for years, but come up with nothing. It still baffles me.

Join the club.

Post a reply to this message

And lo On Mon, 26 Apr 2010 14:28:34 +0200, Bill Pragnell  
<bil### [at] hotmailcom> did spake thusly:

> Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Perhaps I live in a different country or something then? Most of what we
>> receive doesn't appear to be widescreen.
>>
>> (Or are you talking about the HD channels? We only receive SD.)
>
> Lightbulb overhead *ping*!
>
> Are you by any chance still watching the analogue signal? Everything on  
> freeview
> that was made within the last 5-10 years will be widescreen, but I seem  
> to
> recall that PAL is only 4:3...

Nope not even that, the analogue widescreen broadcasts are anamorphic so  
despite being 4:3 they expand to 16:9. Even prior to Freeview most films  
on my 4:3 CRT were black-barred top and bottom. I'm trying to think of any  
current broadcasts in 4:3... the older items obviously particularly those  
 from the USA; oh and one channel on Freeview - Viva
-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

Post a reply to this message

: 4bd58d26@news.povray.org...
>  Well, I'm not saying you are one of those people (and I'm in fact
> assuming you aren't), but I have seen *way* too many people who vehemently
> deny seeing *anything* wrong *at all* in a 4:3 picture which has been
> stretched horizontally to cover the entire 16:9 screen area.

Truly, lots of people are blind to wrong image ratios. Some years ago the 
photos in my university's facebook had been stretched horizontally, turning 
hundreds of students into flattened toads. Nobody found that odd. Recently, 
I saw a framed print of a painting where the image had been squeezed because 
the original image's ratio was wider than the frame's ratio. Why bother to 
crop the image or find the right frame? Making movies in widescreen is a 
real waste: filmmakers could film everything in 1.37:1 as in the old times, 
stretch them to 2.39:1 and few people would notice.

G.

Post a reply to this message

> Truly, lots of people are blind to wrong image ratios. Some years ago the 
> photos in my university's facebook had been stretched horizontally, 
> turning hundreds of students into flattened toads. Nobody found that odd. 
> Recently, I saw a framed print of a painting where the image had been 
> squeezed because the original image's ratio was wider than the frame's 
> ratio. Why bother to crop the image or find the right frame? Making movies 
> in widescreen is a real waste: filmmakers could film everything in 1.37:1 
> as in the old times, stretch them to 2.39:1 and few people would notice.

I think it's because we are used to often seeing things at an angle during 
everyday life, so our brain is quite good at automatically correcting aspect 
ratios for us.

Post a reply to this message

>> I can see the pixels on my monitor.
> 
> What dpi is it?  How far away are you from it?

No idea what the dpi rating is. It's 1400x900 and it's probably about 
30cm tall or something? And I'm sitting maybr 40cm or so away from it. 
(I don't have anything to actually measure it with.)

> My laptop has a 150 dpi screen.  My desktop monitor is 103 dpi and from 
> normal viewing at my desk (60 cm) I cannot see any jagged edges from the 
> pixels (maybe that's just because of the AA settings though).

Yeah, AA hides a multitude of sins. ;-) Curiosly, they don't seem to 
have invented AA for mouse pointers yet. (Except in computer games...)

> Maybe the 
> fact that Windows is not good at scaling has meant that making a 150 or 
> 200 dpi monitor that is used from "desktop" viewing distances would be 
> impossible to use due to the tiny physical size of the fonts and other 
> GUI items?

Plausible.

> I was running it for a while on my laptop with a non-standard dpi 
> setting. On the whole Windows and Office was fine, but IIRC my CAD 
> software screwed up, with some buttons being shifted outside of the 
> window so you couldn't get to them!

Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the 
whole PC, by a mile... ;-)

>> (Then again, my grandparents use FreeSat. Their TV physically has a 
>> 4:3 aspect [it's an old CRT], and the picture seems to fit natively, 
>> so...)
> 
> Most stand alone sat/freeview boxes I've seen have an option to output 
> to 4:3 which just crops the left/right edges of the 16:9 signal (I 
> assume if it's built into a TV it will be set accordingly to match the 
> TV).  This is why they always put any important information in the 
> central part of the screen, as they know some people are still chopping 
> the sides off to watch 4:3.

Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast signals 
in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?

Post a reply to this message

> Haha! And I bet that CAD software was the most expensive thing on the 
> whole PC, by a mile... ;-)

Yeh, I think it is about 10x the price of the laptop itself :-)

> Maybe that's it then. Maybe the reason I still see all broadcast signals 
> in 4:3 aspect is because the receiver is resizing them?

I would definitely check the settings on the receiver.

Post a reply to this message