It has been an exciting week at Pop Art as we have just moved into our new office. One of our welcome additions has been the HDTV plasma screens we have available in our conference rooms. Setting up the widescreen tvs lead me to think about one of my pet peeves - incorrect use of aspect ratios on widescreen tvs. It seems everywhere I go - banks, malls, stores, airports - I see widescreen tvs set up incorrectly and it drives me nuts! C’mon people, you just upgraded to a nice widescreen. Use it correctly!

Here is a quick guide to help you out if you have a widescreen tv.

Widescreen Content

When displaying widescreen content on a widescreen tv, do not letterbox the content anymore than you need to (fig 1). This creates a distorted image where the content is squashed vertically. The entire reason for widescreen display is to not need the letterbox bars anymore! Remove them and the image will look so much better (fig 2).

Standard Content

When displaying standard content (4 x 3), do not stretch the image to fill up the entire screen (fig 3). I know you are really proud of your new widescreen, but this image distortion is hard to relax with. Instead, change your picture settings to use vertical bars to squash the image to a proportional resolution (fig 4). This makes it much easier on the eyes.

I hope this little guide helps a few people out there correctly set up their widescreen tvs.