Finding the right display ratio

My ZDNet colleague George Ou asks an interesting question: Why does that new widescreen HDTV look so weird?

It’s a good summary of the issues that come up when you try to watch a standard 4:3 picture on a wide (16:9) display, or vice versa. And he has lots of good screen shots to illustrate the pros, cons, and tradeoffs of each option. Basically, with a standard picture on a full-screen display, you can choose between a distorted full image, an undistorted image that’s had the top and bottom cropped off, or a picture that uses only the center of the display and leaves bars (usually gray or balck) on either side.

If you use Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 with Update Rollup 2, there’s an additional “smart stretch” option, which stretches the edges of the current picture but leaves the center undistorted. I’ve found it to be an excellent compromise, if your hardware can handle it. I covered this topic last fall in a post that’s worth revisiting if this topic interests you.