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Q. I just got a Toshiba SD Home Theatre TV, and when I watch a movie or cable, I have a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen.
In other words, it doesn’t fill up the entire area of the screen.
Sabine Stochastic offers this advice via CE Pro:
A. You might want to check out some information on different aspect ratios.
First of all, what aspect ratio is your TV? Also, what is the aspect ratio of the media you are playing?
Let’s assume you’re playing 2.35:1 on a non-2.35:1 TV. The TV is making up for the difference by scaling down and masking (adding black bars to) the entire image. That means that you are in fact seeing the entire image. The image just isn’t the full size of your screen.
The program materials (movies) are created with theater aspect ratios in mind. Those ratios are then accounted for on the consumer market by black bars (masking).
That means it could cut the black bars off of your TV, but then when you switch back to regular TV (4.3:1 aspect ratio), which doesn’t have the black bars, the image would need the space to make it the right size and not cut out material.
Another way to look at it is your TV was made for multi-aspect ratio use — switching between different aspect ratios with the limitation that you can only go as big as your smallest aspect ratio will allow, not as big as your TV manufacturer told you it would.
Hope this helps and doesn’t confuse you further.
CE Pro senior editor Robert Archer also chimed in:
It could be a few things. If the TV is a 4:3 or 1.33:1, meaning nearly square, it’s a different aspect ratio than a typical widescreen plasma or LCD TV, which is 16:9 or 1.78:1.
That would cause you to have black bars when watching programming intended for 16:9 TV on a 4:3 TV.
The other cause may be a menu setting. There may be an aspect ratio shape setting on the TV. Set it to 16:9. These settings may be called full screen (4:3) or normal (16:9).
Any movies on DVD or Blu-ray may result in black bars, too, if they are in cinema-type aspect ratios of 1.85:1 or 2.39:1. These movies are much wider than a 16:9 and 4:3 screen.
If that’s the case, look to buy movies that are marked as full screen.
I agree with John. Robert’s advice on purchasing Full-Screen DVD’s is terrible, especially since the questioner’s televison is brand new and will readily display standard wide-screen (1.78 and 1.85) with virtually no black bars, if any. He merely needs to change his aspect ratio settings on his cable box, DVD player, and television to 16:9.
If you look for movies marked Full Screen you will be watching the movie in Pan and Scan. For me personally, this is the worst way to watch a movie. I would much rather deal with black bars than missing out on content. This is the main reason why I chose to set up a 2 piece projection system. I have a native 2.35:1 screen which masks down to 1.78:1. I can watch 90% of the content I have with a perfectly masked image. There are a few oddballs out there in 1.85:1 and older content in 1.33:1 I still cannot mask off, but this is by far the minority of what I am watching.
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John and Dave are right. So much for Robert being a “CE Pro”.
I think this type of advice points to a problem with the avearage so-called pro out out there. We all have had ####### with the kid at BB, but this takes the cake.