Fill screen on a Widescreen TV?

Hi,

I just bought a widescreen flatpanel TV, 16:9 aspect ratio. Yet, when I play widescreen movies, it doesn't fill up the whole screen...which was rather dissapointing. I tried switching the picture size and all but no avail, not full screen.

Any suggestions?

There are two types of wide screen....

You can't fill a widescreen tv without the lines on a widescreen DVD. Unless you zoom in. Basically the widescreen TV is designed to show the DVD how it is meant to be viewed. If you changed your aspect ratio to 16:9 then that is all you can do. It still looks better than a regular tv anyways. Hope that explains it.

T

DashaandSafin said:

Hi,

I just bought a widescreen flatpanel TV, 16:9 aspect ratio. Yet, when I play widescreen movies, it doesn't fill up the whole screen...which was rather dissapointing. I tried switching the picture size and all but no avail, not full screen.

Any suggestions?

Click to expand...

You need a DVD player that can "up-convert" a regular DVD. Although, this alone may not help. It depends on the aspect ratio (format) that the film was shot in, like Shahar said, there are different types of "wide screen". Not all are filmed using a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Sometimes if I get a movie (and it's not widescreen format) when I play it on my 16:9 tv it fills up the whole screen.

Oh really? Damn that sucks... Yea my TV is a 16:9 aspect ratio and I'm kind of saddened that most of my DVD's arent (they dont fill up the screen) although it says widescreen on the box.

Also, I think I may buy the PS3 to switch over to blu ray soon since it seems to be the winner in the DVD war. ANd also whats "up-convert"

I'm confused on what the problem is, and the suggestions are also pretty varied, but I've done a pretty good deal of research on this stuff. If you have a 16:9 widescreen TV, then a 16:9 widescreen DVD will fill up the entire screen. When I first got the widescreen TV and new DVD player, I had to change the setting on the DVD player from 4:3 to 16:9.

HOWEVER, the word widescreen can be misleading, because there are actually two sizes:

16:9 (which is referred to as either 1.85:1 or 1.78:1; the difference is not noticeable), which is as big as widescreen TVs get as well as...

64:27 (always referred to as 2.35:1 or 2.40:1; again the difference is negligible), which is the size many movies use (though some still use 16:9).

Because the latter aspect is bigger than a 16:9 TV can fully show, there will be horizontal letterboxing on the top and bottom of a 16:9 widescreen TV. The terms I've bolded are the ones that you can find on the back of a DVD box, which indicate the aspect the DVD uses.

What I'm surprised by is that fact that the original poster said that they tried to change the size, but it didn't work. I know that with my setup, I have one set of settings that change the aspect on the program I'm watching on my cable remote, and one that changes the aspect of the movie I'm watching, which is on my TV remote. Maybe that'll help.

DashaandSafin said:

Oh really? Damn that sucks... Yea my TV is a 16:9 aspect ratio and I'm kind of saddened that most of my DVD's arent (they dont fill up the screen) although it says widescreen on the box.

Also, I think I may buy the PS3 to switch over to blu ray soon since it seems to be the winner in the DVD war. ANd also whats "up-convert"

Click to expand...

Well upconverting is how a DVD player improves the picture quality of a standard -definition DVD, but it doesn't have anything to do with the aspect ratio.

One more thing: if I'm right, then the problem is that the DVD's that don't fill up the screen are in the 2.40:1 or 2.35:1 format. If you want to fill up the whole screen, you can zoom the picture in, but then you lose some of the picture on the side, as well as some of the clarity of the picture itself. I know that with plasma TVs, a static picture will burn into the TV screen, especially one that hasn't been broken in for 50-200 hours, so the letterboxing is not good to maintain for a really long time.

D-Bomb said:

Well upconverting is how a DVD player improves the picture quality of a standard -definition DVD, but it doesn't have anything to do with the aspect ratio.

Click to expand...

Correct, I didn't mean to say up-converting would change the original aspect ratio of a DVD, but that a player with an "up-convert" capability (like most HD-DVD players have) can take a DVD (in 4:3 aspect) and fill the whole screen on a 16:9 TV. (The image does appear a little "stretched"). If the movie was filmed in 2.4:1 then regradless of what player you use, you'll still get bars on a 16:9 TV.

Maybe regular DVD players can do the same thing but I wouldn't know since I bought my TV and an HD-DVD player at the same time, so I never used a regular DVD player on a wide-screen TV.