Fake Widescreen

by Bob Seidel

* I pride myself on my English, but there was an error in last week's column. That will teach me to rely on mere spell checking. I used the term "stared" referring to the stars of a movie instead of starred. Perhaps the stars stared when I did that?

* If there is one thing that bugs me about TV these days, it's fake widescreen. Let me explain.

The television standard that we have used for literally more than a half a century has an aspect ratio (the relationship of the width to the height of the picture) of 4:3 - a bit wider than square. This is also true for the old VGA computer screen standard. But even before TV became available or popular, Hollywood was experimenting with wider screens. The reasons are a bit obscure, but we of course have two eyes arranged horizontally and thus we see a field of view that is wider than it is high. Or perhaps it was because Hollywood wanted bigger theater screens, but to make them any wider still using 4:3 would also require that the screen also be taller, requiring significant re-working of existing movie theaters (visit a Cinemax theater to see). Going to a wider aspect ratio seemed the obvious answer.

One of the first movie systems to attempt this was called Cinerama. This used a curved screen at which three projectors each beamed a portion of the movie. Cinemax also had early multi-channel surround sound. The biggest issue with Cinerama was that the three movie portions never seemed to merge well, and color differences between the three films (what we would now call "white balance") made the borders even more obvious. Cinemax also required major upgrading of the movie theater screen and never was very popular.

Cinemascope was the first popular wide screen format. It still used an almost flat screen, just wider. There were many versions of this widescreen technique, each with a different aspect ratio.

Unfortunately, when showing widescreen movies on TV, the wide movie format didn't fit. The two ways around this problem were to a) leave out the side content, or b) show the movie in "letterbox" format, leaving black bars on the top and bottom. Letterbox to me was the preferable format - it showed the entire movie, albeit a bit smaller.

Now we get to the new digital TVs. Again, wanting to provide something that seemed "new" and to provide more of a movie-house experience, the industry adopted a widescreen format for HD television. HD uses a 16:9 aspect ratio, and many of the TVs you see for sale now have that format. The problem is that normal TV is still 4:3 and will remain so until the FCC mandated changeover to HD occurs some time in the future (the TV industry is still resisting).

Here is the problem: There isn't much HD or widescreen content available these days. None of the regular Time Warner cable channels is wide - only the HD channels. Of course, most DVDs today are in widescreen, but only if you have the proper TV to play them. And thus the issue: The default for showing 4:3 TV on a widescreen set is to expand the picture to fill the screen. If done in a linear fashion, the entire screen is just "fat" and that is how the people in it look. A circle shown will be an ellipse. But most TVs use a non-linear system - leaving the center as-is, but stretching the sides even more. This gives that strange "fisheye" effect when the scene moves. I can't stand that, and so even though I have a widescreen TV, I always show the 4:3 channels with gray bars on the sides (called reverse letterbox).

But there is more. Perhaps to prepare us for the widescreen world to come, many TV channels are using fake widescreen. They just take a normal scene and make it look like letterbox by putting black bars on the top and bottom, cutting out some of the picture. The way you can tell real widescreen is that is looks, well, wide! You see more of a panoramic view. If the view looks the same as always, just with the black bars on the top and bottom, it's probably fake widescreen.

So, enjoy your new TV with widescreen content, but don't put up with fake widescreen!

(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)