What’s the deal with the enlarged picture on broadcasts ... ?

[SlyFerret]

I looked up your TV. In today's HD world, it's a bit of an odd bird, being a 1080i display in a 4:3 aspect ratio.

You may have already done this, but... in the dish receiver setup, there is an menu option for the HD setup, where you can tell it what resolution to output, and what aspect ratio your TV is. Check and make sure it's set to 1080i, 4:3.

To get HD programming to display right on that TV, it's either going to have to be cropped, or letterboxed.

-SF

 

[BnT.atl]

I looked up your TV. In today's HD world, it's a bit of an odd bird, being a 1080i display in a 4:3 aspect ratio.

You may have already done this, but... in the dish receiver setup, there is an menu option for the HD setup, where you can tell it what resolution to output, and what aspect ratio your TV is. Check and make sure it's set to 1080i, 4:3.

To get HD programming to display right on that TV, it's either going to have to be cropped, or letterboxed.

-SF

Thanks for the comment, Ferrett,

I did set the Dish set up to ‘widescreen’ as choice, but it never actually ‘changes’.

as part of the ‘odd bird’-ness of this tv, there appears to be no way to check the aspect ratio ... its not in the instruction manuel and the ‘aspect’ button on the remote does nothing. The ‘adjustments menu’ is bare-bones to say the least. I know i need to upgrade, it will have to be in time.

I could take letter box, because certain HBO shows, mostly their original series, are in wide-screen with black bars on the top+bottom ... oddly, their movies are cut+cropped. Some network tv shows come in as letter box (Fox’s recent ‘Glee’) but most do not. Same for some other networks, SciFi used to show ‘Battlestar Galactic’ in wide-screen with black bars on the top+bottom. Its all very hit and miss

 

[whatchel1]

Feb

You are right, mike ... I actually noticed this 6 months before the "digital transition" and have attempted to get the root of the problem since then ... which is a long time ...
only recently found this site and knew there had to be people on here who are more knowledgeable than i concerning this issue
thanks

It started early in Feb. NBC told us this is the way it would be and changed it. I would guess that the other nets did the same thing.

 

[Pepper]

Not sure why, but I felt like going off on a tangent here: my TV is also a 4x3 HDTV, a Samsung PCL5415. I took the plunge a few years back and got a ViP622 and it's been pretty much exclusively in letterbox mode since then. On the rare occasion I watch something from another source I notice the burn-in on the top and bottom. But that's ok, it's an old TV anyway and has a beautiful picture when in 1080i mode. I can't imagine having exclusively SD at this point.

BnT.atl, you might be missing the left and right sides of your picture now, but what you are really missing are about 84% of the pixels.

Simple math:
SD 720x480 = 345600 pixels
HD 1920x1080 = 2073600 pixels
Granted, Dish downrezzes both SD and HD, so the actual numbers are smaller, but the concept is the same.

Have you checked into "Dish'n it Up" ? It should not be very expensive to trade your existing dish boes) for a new HD DVR and your monthly cost would be about $10 more to have a better picture than you've ever seen. Even less than that if you replace both receivers with a dual-tuner HD DVR which can feed both TVs without the extra receiver fee you're paying now.