Path to HDTV 

Step 6 - 4:3 Playback

One of the more common questions I get since upgrading to the HDTV is just how I watch the anime shows. With 99% of things released in the U.S. being 4:3 or fullscreen material, the widescreen set doesn't seem to be the best investment. 

Of course, the anime wasn't the overriding reason we wanted a widescreen set. It's all the live action movies we watch (and we watch those more than we do anime!). But 4:3 playback presents itself with certain potential problems for the HDTV/widescreen fan, and there's an almost constant war of words going on among the home theater folks regarding what the best way to play it is.

Myself, I fully admit that for movies I really prefer their original aspect ratio. One should assume then that the same applies to 4:3 material, which means when watching regular TV and anime discs, we should be watching the show in standard mode, as seen below.

You'll notice that there are gray bars along the sides of the picture. Why does this make widescreen owners, or at least a large number of them, nervous? Those gray bars can and will eventually "burn in" on the screen, since it's a static image being shown. Anyone whose watched enough 4:3 material, especially live TV, will also learn to dread the station bugs in the lower corner. There's nothing like seeing the TNT logo on every channel and every DVD you watch.

So what's a concerned widescreen owner to do? Well, the Toshiba set has three variants of their "Theaterwide" mode, which is designed primarily for non-anamorphic letterboxed DVD's. Here's how the same image looks in Theaterwide 1 mode.

What this essentially does is zoom in slightly and performs a slight stretch as well. The immediate and obvious benefit is that you're saving the set from the potential burn in. An added bonus, and one of the reasons you rarely see me complain about it is because of this, the subtitles tend to look a hell of a lot better as well. As for the image that's lost, you can see by the top of Van's hair exactly what's lost, and it's extremely minor. Is it worth the sacrifice?

The set also has it's "full" mode for anamorphic material, which presents an image that looks like this:

You can see how this slightly stretches the image when it pulls it across the screen, but it retains that tiny bit that gets cut off in Theaterwide mode. There are other very subtle differences, but during normal playback it's hardly noticeable.

Personally, we tend to play most of our stuff in Theaterwide mode and occasionally in Full mode when we simply forget to change it. Changing between the three settings hasn't shown any visible changes in the material itself. A rainbow in Merle's hair is in the same exact spot for all three images. Same with the slight jaggies caused by the rainbows. 

As widescreen sets start to move more into the market, more and more people are going to be faced with this dilemma. Is the material the holy grail in the end or does the slight cropping justify saving the potentially high cost of the set? I've definitely made my choice early on and it's the same as many others. In the end, it's all going to come down to personal preference though.