Quote:
Originally Posted by Electronic M
I saw something for the first time that I've been morbidly anticipating for some time....a TRIPLE boxed commercial
|
I probably first saw those in 2003. There is a very easy explanation. The commercial was 16:9, but it was on a 4:3 channel that is encoded as 16:9 but displayed on your 4:3 set. No TV station, much less a cable system, is going to on-the-fly change formats to assist various display types. (Europe and maybe other places had a variation of this possibility in the late days of analog TV, when standard-def widescreen TV sets were common there; that may be what Chip was describing.) The only near-cure is a tuner that can remember per-channel "zoom" settings, so that you could fill the 4:3 screen with that 4:3 channel (other than the commercial's 16:9 self-format, which would never get "fixed"). The Zenith DTT-900/901 or Channel Master CM7000 tuners can do this if I remember right, but they are for over-the-air only.