Now I know even on widescreen tvs, we will get black bars on the top and bottom. However, on my 50' screen, on standard dvds these are usually about 6' from the top and bottom, for a total of a foot worth of black bars. Now I also tested this on a 52' tv, and the bars were even bigger. Am I correct in saying that the bigger the tv, the picture stays the say and just extends the black bars, or is there something else going on here? I hate having to zoom in to make it a little more acceptable. Thanks.
Make sure that your dvd player is set to 16 by 9 aspect ratio. You should only have the black bars taking a couple of inches without stretching the picture.
I tried that. Before I posted the dvd player was set to 4:3. However, chaning the setting to 16:9 made no difference what so ever.
Sorry that didn't work. A friend of mine has a tv that does the same thing with SD sources. I got lucky with my tv (52inch) but in the future I will view SD in the store before I purchase. Try posting the model number for your tv and see if anyone has the same one and knows a workaround.
In the setup menu have you changed the screen mode between normal,letterbox, panorama, or auto to see if any of those aspect ratios work better?
I have, but it only has Normal, Wide, Cinema and Zoom. Normal gives me black bars on all 4 sides (unless on a HD station) and widcreen fits all wide, but like I said, I have the super large black bars on the top and bottom (about a foot total). Wide, well, dosn't nothing for widescree, only strecthes 4:3 ratios. Cinema is a small zoom and zoom is a big zoom. They will change the bars, but I shouldn't have to zoom in about 3-5 inches into the screen to fill it up, resulting is a terriable picture. I know it sounds like im complaining about the bars, im really not, and know why they are there. But as to why my 50' tv has the same video size as my 32' in rather odd to me thats all.
Don't be sorry about complaining as I agree that you shouldn't have the bars taking up that much space. Four to six inches total should be the max. I'm surprised that your tv had different aspect ratios than the ones I mentioned because I got those from the online direction manual for your model of tv. Noted though most manuals cover 3 to 5 different models from the same generation of display these days. The only thing that I could suggest now would be to contact the manufacturer and ask them to address the issue. Sorry I couldn't help. If you need help contacting the manufacturer then let me know.
