Sony Wega "SMART" TV

[vettesea]

Hello

I thought I would post this question to see if anyone has the knowledge in this area.

I have a 32" Widescreen Sony Wega TV (KV32FQ70 I think, not at home at the moment). My question revolves around the SMART option on the display settings. I cannot get my head around what it is doing. If I select widescreen display it appears people are squashed. The SMART option appears to make it normal, however you miss the top and bottom of the picture and you have to use the scroll button to get it. This is particularly annoying when watching sport (scores in top corner) and playing on my XBOX because of options etc..

Does anyone know anything about these options and how I am best to configure the TV. Any help would be much appreciated. The problem does not appear to be there when I watch a DVD from a shop.

What brought this to my attention was the fact that I was making a dvd from DV video capture and was not sure what output to encode with on TMPGenc Plus, ie 4:3 or 16:9.

Thanks

[flaninacupboard]

Unless you have a 16:9 lens on your DV camera you will want to encode as 4:3.

Widescreen TV's usually try and fill as much of the screen as possible with picture, obviously if you have a 4:3 source t either has to stretch it horizontally to fill the screen with a distorted image, or crop the top and bottom of the image so it will fit the width of the screen with no disortion. the third (and best) option is to set it to just display your 4:3 source in the centre of the screen with black areas on the left and right of the pciture.

Go read up about aspect ratios if you're confused, there's plenty of sites out there!

[vettesea]

Cheers for the reply.

I was more curious about the SMART option on the telly and what it was actually doing to the picture, it does not look distorted at all but as i say i lose the top and bottom of the picture. I was hoping someone else may have this type of Sony tv.

You are right about the 16:9 on the dv camera, it does not record via that so therefore I have been using 4:3 output.

[flaninacupboard]

the smart or auto option varies from brand to brand. sound like all your TV is doing is literally chopping the top and botttom of the image off and just displaying a rectangle in the mddle, this mode is called 16:9 zoom on most sets i have seen.