LCD TV 3:4 ?

[Tom81]

ON these TVs if you choose a program with tradition 3:4 ratio do the sides of the screen go grey? black? or another color?
My friends projection TV goes grey on the sides and I find it distracting although, not as horrendous as stretch with the fat faces .

[guns1inger]

Some widescreen's have grey pillars, some allow you to change the pillar colour. Grey is chose because it is reasonable neutral to prevent burn in of the borders if a lot of 4:3 TV is watched. In short, learn to live with it, or get your mum to make a little set of curtains to hide the edges. This is how they do it i the cinema.

[Wile_E]

...not as horrendous as stretch with the fat faces .

I can't stand 4:3 material stretched to 16:9. It looks awful in my opinion. The problem is... most people don't know anything about aspect ratios, and put their TV's on stretch. I find lots of 16:9 TV's that are on stretch mode in local restaurants and bars. Unbelievable! I sometimes tell the people that their TV looks all stretched but they think it looks okay! What is almost as bad are people that use the zoom function of their DVD player to zoom movies so they use more display on a 16:9. What happens in the process is that parts of the movie are being cropped off. This is not how it was intended to be viewed. If people want a bigger picture, they unfortunately need to buy a bigger TV.

[FulciLives]

My 16x9 WS TV defaults to grey for pillowboxing but I can go into the TV menu and change it to black but that really is not a good idea as that can cause burn in which is why grey is often used as there is less chance of burn in.

I guess my point is this ... some televisions allow you to change the color and some do not so you have to get ahold of the manual (many companies let you download a free PDF file of the manual) or go play with one in a retail store.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[Tom81]

Thanks for the helpful feedback.