On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 18:21:29 +0100, Tim Anderson wrote:

Same as me then but if you watch 4:3 with black bars on a 16:9 you are
reducing the life span of your tv.

1. How so?
2. Is there a mode that stretches a conventional aspect picture across the
whole screen without distorting the aspect (IOW trims top & bottom of the
picture)? I can't find this out for myself because we don't have a WSTV.

1) It uses the phosphors in the 4:3 section of the screen more and
eventually you will end up with the black borders being brighter than the
center when watching a widescreen presentation.

2) Ummm, no.... you just get used to it, you could through it into letter
box but 1. I'm not sure that would help & 2. Letterbox would look poo.
Widescreen progressiveley stretches the picture by the way, the center
portion looks normal, it is the stuff to the sides that gets stretched. It
sounds horrible when describe but is suprisingly easy to get used to.
Eventually 4:3 makes everything look thin :-)

Ah - I thought that phosphor degradation had become less of an issue.
Thanks for this, and for the explanation re. the progressive stretch
characteristic.

Ed wrote:

So I
have it set to output as 16:9.

That's right.


However, this seems to make it
automatically send all pictures to the tv as 16:9 despite the source
material (sky news) only being 4:3. The 4:3 option is removed from the
'justify' options by the panasonic tv when receiving the rgb signal
from the digibox, so i cannot manually select 4:3.

If so you have a very badly designed TV that, in my opinion, is not
fit for the purpose for which it was intended. There being no time
limit on this I would return it for a full refund.

You can however select 14:9 or "smart" and this will more or less do
the trick, though you won't get the real 4:3 that I like to have.

--
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The Sky Digital FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/yvnsy
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Fed up with logos / red buttons? : http://logofreetv.org/
BBC gone? : http://www.astra2d.co.uk/
----
Only the truth as I see it.
No monies return'd. ;-)