HDMI Converter Recommendations

[user181]

Originally Posted by David Roper

Why the hell would you want that? I wish it overscanned even more. The letterbox is almost invisible on most sets, but I wish it was 100% zoomed in. I f**king HATE a letterbox...can you tell?

Perhaps you misunderstand the issue. Depending on the signal source, sometimes there are different adjustments that are needed (but unavailable) to make the video display properly on a 4:3 set. If you're using a digital media player (i.e. Roku, etc.), there are occasions when it would be nice to have a scaling function in order to crop 16:9 content. In the case of over-the-air DTV, I've experienced a few sub-channels whose broadcast signal appears entirely wrong on a 4:3 set -- the show is originally 4:3 format, but what I see onscreen is horizontally-squeezed video with black bars on the sides, and my converter boxes are somehow forbidden from zooming and/or stretching the video (on these channels only). It's quite annoying, as the video portion looks almost like a 1:1 aspect ratio.

So, it would be nice if there were a video processing device which had composite inputs and outputs which allowed the user to perform various zooming, stretching, and/or squeezing functions on the input signal, to compensate for sources which are not displaying properly for whatever reason.