Telly Aspect Ratios...anyone into home cinema?

[captain nemo1701]

I was mucking about last night optimising the picture on my LG widescreen telly. I put in the Gravity blu-ray and it came up in 16:9 ratio but has black 'letterbox' bands. I can only get rid of them by selecting 'cinema zoom' which converts the image to the old cinemascope 2:35 ratio before allowing me to expand it. It does, however, mean a bit of image cropping at the sides and the pop-up blu ray menu can be hard to spot at the bottom of the screen. I thought of fiddling around with the player.

I got the LG set due to it's thin bezel and it does look good but strange that blu-rays should play with letterbox banding when in 16:9. I was under the impression that it's all standard 16:9 these days so that the telly & blu-ray player would work together to fill the screen.

Any home cinema buffs here?.

 

[marknotgeorge]

Gravity's aspect ratio is 2.35:1, and will presumably be on the Blu-Ray at 1920x1080 resolution (which is 16:9), so you will get the letterboxing top and bottom on a 16:9 telly unless you zoom in.

 

[ColinJ]

A director is working to whatever aspect ratio they have decided to use. I trust the director to decide what I should see and I want to see that, therefore zooming is out, despite the fact that a lot of TV companies impose pan and scan on us!

If you want to see a perfect example of what is wrong with zooming/pan and scan, watch the scene towards the end of Bridge Over The River Kwai which has Alec Guiness's character, a Japanese officer, and a third person in shot, one in the centre, one hard left, and one hard right ...

If you zoom the picture, you can only see the person in the centre, and the voices of two characters in this vital scene are coming from people off the screen.

If you watch it panned and scanned then there is a sickening 'ping pong' effect as the picture swings violently back and forth to try and keep up with whichever actor is speaking!

 

[threebikesmcginty]

I have mine set to 16:9 unless we get a Looney Tunes or Hanna Barbera disc on, then it's got to be 1:33 to be 'right'.

I went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel the other night, that was filmed in 3 different aspects including 1:33!

 

[marknotgeorge]

Mine's set on Automatic, so it should be okay for most things. I've finally managed to cure my dad of super-wide-o-vision on 4:3 programs!

 

[captain nemo1701]

Gravity's aspect ratio is 2.35:1, and will presumably be on the Blu-Ray at 1920x1080 resolution (which is 16:9), so you will get the letterboxing top and bottom on a 16:9 telly unless you zoom in.

Ah, that'll explain it. It loses a little on cinema zoom, but not much. I'll watch it in letterbox format in 3D and see how I go