Jenny wrote:One of the problems with TV shops displaying things in "widescreen" is that a lot of them don't actually have a widescreen signal to use - they just hook all the TVs in the store up to an analogue terrestrial signal. You'd think the big-name chains might have got wise to this and created a DVD showreel to feed to their TVs instead.
Right, you can get back to the actual topic of the thread now...
In some cases they do - they just don't use them. Back in 1998 I used to work at homeworld we had a video and a DVD from Sony called 'The Widescreen Experience' - almost an hour of various widescreen footage, with the standard marketing explanation about why widescreen is better.
What did we use it for? Umm, for demonstrating VCRs and DVD Players, our entire stock of which (except those sold as packages) was connected to portable 14" TVs! All of our widescreen sets were showing Westcountry TV - which at that time transmitted almost nothing (and afaik, definately nothing at all during the hours the store was open) in widescreen, even though we had a VCR in the aerial feed to the TV sets and so we could have played the widescreen video on the widescreen TVs.
One day I had the dubious pleasure of looking after the widescreens. As well as having to sell a screen format I don't like and don't believe in (although believe me, when money is involved, I can spout that 'widescreen is better because it's a more natural shape' crap as well as the next person lol). At first, I set them all up properly, which meant they were displaying a 4:3 pillarboxed picture with black bands down the side. It was my intention that this would be a strength, showing the extra screen space which true widescreen transmission offered.
Until that is, a couple of pensioners walked past proclaiming 'I would buy that! You pay all that money, and just get a little picture in the centre!'. The problem was compounded when I came back from my break to find that Westcountry were showing their afternoon film in 16:9, leaving my widescreen sets all having a huge black border round all 4 sides of the screen.
Seeing now though the opportunity to actually get the damn things to display something in widescreen, I quickly changed them all to 'movie zoom' which zooms in in a 16:9 shaped portion of the picture, in this case meaning that the widescreen picture filled the screen.
After the film finished of course, the movie zoom setting was no good. Some of the TVs were intelligent enough to realise that a fullscreen picture was now being shown and switched the ratio - but to 'expand' which makes the picture look squashed. Others didn't and stayed zoomed in. So now I had some TVs in the right ratio but with the top and bottom cut off, and others with a squashed pictured. All looked awful, although after people earlier were too stupid to realise that if a program isn't in widescreen, then you need those black bands at the sides to keep the ratio right, I decided to concede and switched them all to the mode I hate the most - the squashed picture.
No sooner did I do that than a number of people commented on how the picture looked squashed.
I couldn't win. But then, that was in 1998 when unless you had a showreel (although of course we did, but just didn't use it) it was all but impossible to get a widescreen set to display a widescreen picture.
Now though, I agree, there is no excuse. All of the big stores sell DTT boxes. If they're in a DTT area, they just need to connect a box into the loop, set it to News 24, and there you have it. If not, then they all sell Sky, so they can connect a Sky box into the loop and set that to News 24.
But no, all the big stores do still seem to just use the analogue tuner with them, and display a squashed picture. Which for some reason, people seem to have become tolerant of. Back in 98, when someone was presented with an incorrectly set up widescreen TV, even if they didn't know the first thing about TV, would still instantly feel that something was wrong with the picture. Now, when widescreen is everywhere, they don't seem to notice that they are watching a squashed picture.