Gaffer Tape said:lordjedi said:I agree with this 100%. I still have trouble convincing people that the "black bars" are suppose to be there. And now the same thing is happening with grain. If it's suppose to be there, then I have no problem with it. Hell, I use to be one of those uneducated consumers that didn't know about widescreen. Once I did find out though, that's all I wanted. Once I learned the difference between "widescreen" and anamorphic widescreen, the black bars didn't bother me at all (when I first same them on my widescreen TV, I was pissed).
Just to make sure we're on the same page, I'm not as concerned about widescreen itself as I am about original aspect ratios. It's taken nearly two decades of home video (and decades before that of television broadcasts) of chopping up movie frames to holy hell before people finally started to get educated. The only problem is, that now that widescreen TVs are becoming the norm, the opposite problem is happening with the uninformed consumer: television shows and movies are being cropped to fit this new wide television screen without pillarboxing. They did it on those crappy DBZ season box sets, and they've done it on a few Disney movies. It almost seems like we got across the wrong message. Widescreen's suddenly the new "thing," so everybody wants it wide, regardless of how it's supposed to be. Well, that, and the same people who complained about horizontal black bars and never learned any better are now complaining about vertical black bars and still probably won't know any better. It's cringeworthy when people stretch out a 4:3 image to fit a 16:9 screen. I saw my roommate go above and beyond that. He was watching a dual-sided DVD. One side was 4:3, and the other was widescreen. He was watching the pan and scan version stretched out to widescreen. I think a few synapses in my brain blew out when I realized the total lack of logic in that.
Haha. That is pretty strange. If given the choice, I'll always take the wide aspect version. Unfortunately, I can't get all my channels in a wide format, so I'm forced to watch 4:3 ratio programming stretched to 16:9. It's either that or I end up with burn in on the sides (my tv had burn in marks that I could see, so I stopped watching it like that). But otherwise I agree that watching a 4:3 program stretched out is cringeworthy.
I haven't seen any TV shows that don't use pillarboxing where appropriate. Most of the local HD news channels use it, they just don't use black (usually some kind of swirly blue color). As for other tv shows, I'm assuming they're filming them in wide aspect now. I know the last few seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer were filmed in widescreen, so they match the aspect of a wide tv. I'm assuming Smallville is filmed the same way now since they also match the aspect of a wide tv (at least the HD channel does).