Parental TV Aspect Ratio Confusion!
I fix TV for you! Now you dun have to flip channels!
My parents got themselves an HD DirecTV box today and it reminded me of the one thing I don't like about HDTVs. That's the confusion surrounding aspect ratio and what is the best setting to have your TV on so everything will display correctly. Typically with most sources one only has to worry about what the setting is on the TV itself.... if you set it to original aspect ratio it'll just automatically show it to the correct width whether it be 16:9, cinemascope or if it's non-widescreen it'll show it without stretching fitting to the screen with pillar boxes.
However DirecTV decided to make it a bit more confusing than that. The box comes with "unmodified" display setting as the default setting but that's incorrect the way they labelled that. Unmodified actually modifies non-widescreen content stretching it to full the screen causing faces to look fatter than they should be. In order to get it to be correct you have to specifically choose "pillar box" from the settings. Then it'll be automatic the way I described above. So if a program is 4:3 it'll display unmodified with pillar boxes on the side but if it supports 16:9 it'll show the way that's supposed to too.
Why did they do this? It's misleading to those who don't know any better. Maybe the engineers at DirecTV are biased towards stretching all the 4:3 non-widescreen content. Bad engineers, bad! With DirecTV HD not only does the stretched mode look fatter but it's also more pixelated and blah looking than the "pillar box" setting which is the true unmodified setting for non-widescreen content.
At least my parents have me to help them... my mom said she thought it looked odd and fat before after I fixed it for her.