Canuck Audio Mart

This may very well be a lame question, but humor me anyway. Watching a widescreen (1.85:1) version of The Princess Bride on a non-upconverting DVD player....in other words, an older Pioneer Elite. TV is a Samsung LCD-1 year old or so. The movie starts and the default is a very squeezed letterbox viewing of the movie--black bars on top and bottom, but picture squeezed. I find if I use the Zoom tool on my TV remote I can get the picture to fill out quite nicely....with no black bars...I imagine I may be cropping a bit of the movie, but no big deal.

So my question: was this DVD formatted for an older 4:3 television? If I choose the 4:3 setting, I get black bars all around....hence I decided to use the zoom feature.

This is not so much an issue for me as a question of interest. It seems with the advent of modern TVs we've just been saddled with more aspect ratios.

1:85 or 1:78:1 movies should fill a 16x9 screen no problem. I watched this same title on Blu-Ray a couple of weeks back and it displayed as full screen no problem. It's probably settings on the player/TV if the case on your DVD shows the movie as being 1:85:1.

stickers, this may help with your questions:

Black Bars-Why do I still have these?

Good chance the DVD stickers watched was not enhanced for widescreen TVs:

1.85:1 "Standard" DVDs (Not Enhanced for Widescreen (non-anamorphic))

These DVDs are the correct aspect ratio to fill a widescreen TV. You will need to set the TV to it's "horizontal and vertical stretch mode" (zoom) to properly see this type of movie. There should be no black bars (or they can be very thin).

That sounds about right. Thanks for taking the time on this one....I`ll have to spend some time reading that site.