Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Opinions on widescreens....I cant decide!

BigWill,

Both 16:9 and 4:3 have the same vertical resolution. However, in the case of a 4:3 aspect screen, many of those lines are being used to display a big black border. The actual portion showing the actual movie has fewer lines of display because they're showing the black bar.

Squeeze mode, as I understand it, refocuses for anamorphic video on just the 16:9 content, thereby providing full resolution.

This is the entire purpose of Anamorphic.

Wading in here.. (Will leave the technical side to others)
I own a big Mits, and have high regard for Sony's RPTV, as well as their tube sets..
Ok, you want the hauling ability of a truck and the comfort of a nice car.. Do you compromise and buy a station wagon or buy a truck AND a car.. Nothing can do it all..
You want a 'knock yer socks off' picture, you get a big screen.. You want nice clean analog t/v shows, you get a tube set.. OR, buy one of each, and use them accordingly...
Don't have the money or the room for that ? Decide which features are more important to you..
Analog on a RPTV is not its strong suit.. You need to get further back from the screen for the image to improve..
Did I buy my Mits for watching reruns of I Love Lucy? I think not..
Do you buy a sports car because it gets better gas mileage ? No, you buy it to enjoy it for what it was made to do best, and you except the fact that it's not the perfect ride for all occations.. But on those warm sunny days, none of that matters..
Do the leg work, check out the stores, decide what will work best for you.. Ain't nothing gonna do it all..

How bout plasma...doesn't that do both? It's too expensive at this point, and I've heard rumors of longevity issues (they die quicker then regular TV), but if they can fix that in the next couple of years and the price continues to come down it would seem that would be a good option for a bigger screen that can look good regardless. Let me know if I'm off on this assumption though, as I've said, I haven't done the big screen research yet.

Are you saying that a 4:3 HD RPTV is not capable of showing the 480 (?) or 720 (?) resolution that DVDs put out? They have line doublers and allow you to use progressive scan, right? I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I gather your knowledge is second hand as well. IMO all that technical mumbo-jumbo is used to confuse consumers and make it easier to sell them overpriced crap they don't need.
A progressive scan DVD image on a 4:3, HD, 60" RPTV will look just as good, or better, as the same image on a 42" widescreen.

Mikey,
How about a BMW M5?

Which I'm guessing is what the Plasma correlates to...a very expensive option that does both.

That's not what I'm saying at all. Here's some quick math for you:

If both a 16:9 and a 4:3 set are showing a 480p image, they're showing 480 lines of vertical resolution. In the case of the 16:9 screen, all 480 lines occupy the range used by a 1.78:1 image. Obviously, that's a little less common than 1.85:1 so a little of the screen will be lost to display the entire thing or it will be stretched. That space is approximately (1.85-1.78)/1.85 or 4% of the 480 lines of vertical resolution wasted.

In the case of a 4:3 screen, the 480 lines of vertical resolution occupy both the image space and a larger portion of the screen not displaying an image. In the case of 1.85:1, that's (1.85-1.33)/1.33 or approximately 28% of the 480 lines of vertical resolution are wasted by not showing anything.

If you're still confused, you may find this helpful:
http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/

Except that, for the money, you can get a significantly better picture than Plasma offers whereas more performance than an M5 for the money is pretty hard to come by outside of heavy aftermarket modification.

Plasma's picture is pretty poor to me. There's a lot of artifacting, the contrast isn't great and colors don't look as life like. The only real benefit of Plasma, to me, is pure aesthetics and space savings.

Don't get me wrong, if I had the money for a home theater room and wanted something nondescript for the family room, I'd probably mount a Plasma over the fire place and move all technology out of there otherwise.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think I mixed up my denominators. It should be closer to 4% and 40% respectively.

I'm going back to my marketing work...

Anyone ever feel like their thread as been hijacked? =)

Just kidding...I an enjoying all the good info. I know so little about the video side of home theatre its sad. Im happy "watching" a movie with my eyes closed as long as the audio is done right.

Thanks for all the info everyone