It's your vote! Newer flat screen HD sets or older crt sets.

[Chip Chester]

re: Coogar's comment about widescreen... On the films, they were framed up and shot wide-screen originally -- at least for the past 40-50 years or so. Things were cropped or "pan 'n scanned" on film-to-tape transfer. Now HD will allow display in a way that is closer to original screen layout.

Chip

[ChrisW6ATV]

I am glad to see some people in this discussion who do prefer modern high-definition displays for their regular viewing. My regular viewing is on a 46-inch LCD set, and movies/football are on a 92-inch screen fed by an Epson 1080P projector.

Originally Posted by Chip Chester

re: Coogar's comment about widescreen... On the films, they were framed up and shot wide-screen originally -- at least for the past 40-50 years or so. Things were cropped or "pan 'n scanned" on film-to-tape transfer. Now HD will allow display in a way that is closer to original screen layout.

Chip

Very good points. People may not think about or be aware of the major differences between movies (made for large, wide screens, especially after 1953) and TV programming (made for small screens that were all 4:3-ratio until a few years ago). If you look carefully at TV shows from the late 1950s or early 1960s, you will probably find that they were even formatted not just for 4:3 screens, but actually for the "roundie" color CRTs. Look at the credits, for example, and see if there is any text at all anywhere near the corners of the picture in shows of that era, even black-and-white shows.

Content created for TV broadcasts also always had to be careful of things like fine-striped suits causing "moire" or other patterns on the screen, certain color combinations being blurrier than others, and so on.

Now that I am getting more of my early TV sets restored to good, reliable performance, I plan to enjoy actually using them to watch older shows more, just for fun.