Set your aspect ratio Video
Set your aspect ratio Video Transcript
[ Music ] ^M00:00:02
>> Ah, old fashioned TVs. They were so easy. You plugged them in, connected a cable, and turned them on. But HDTVs are so fiddly by comparison, and one setting I see folks screw up the most is aspect ratio. Aspect ratio is how the TV fills its screen with the signal it's getting. Now, since HDTVs are widescreen, there are a number of options, many of them wrong. First of all, there's normal or four by three. That'll put bars on either side of a standard width signal. That's what it's supposed to do. But a lot of folks don't like that look, so they often will use zoom. Zoom magnifies everything evenly, and it will eliminate the window box bars, but it may crop some of the top and bottom of the image. That's not good. Then there's wide, or sixteen by nine. And that's best for a signal that is natively wide. If you use this mode, though, to stretch and fill a narrow signal, everything looks weird, and people look pudgy. They won't like that. Finally, there's panorama. This has various names, but it's a mode that I don't like, whatever it's called. It typically stretches the sides more than the middle, so when the camera pans, you'll almost feel nauseous. The rule for best picture quality is to watch a program in the setting that matches the way it was shot, normal or wide. ^M00:01:23 [ Music ]
In this Quick Tip, Brian Cooley runs through the different types of aspect ratios that your HDTV can read.
