The only purpose the "stretch" function has is for special video sources like DVD players. Sometimes you will see a program made for SDTV letterbox on such a channel, and in that case a zoom is called for.) stations that are HD always broadcast in the same resolution, and "upconvert" their standard 4:3 programs to the HD resolution, placing black "pillarbox" bars on the left and right. HDTV broadcasts are all natively in widescreen, and just about all TVs will detect that and handle it. NTSC broadcasts are all in 4:3, though some are letterboxed inside the 4:3 which may call for doing a "zoom" to expand the inner box to fill the screen, but never a "stretch" which makes everybody fat. For broadcast signals, a TV should be able to figure out the aspect ratio. It is presumably for those people that the TVs are set this way. (Do they feel cheated with a letterbox movie on a 4:3 TV?) Perhaps they feel cheated that they aren't getting to use all of their screen. They say they would rather see a distorted picture than see those bars. They just "don't like" having the blank bars on either side of the 4:3 picture that you get on a widescreen TV. This is probably because I routinely meet people who claim they want to set their TV this way. I've called down to the desk to get somebody to fix the TV and they often don't know what I'm talking about, or if somebody comes it takes quite a while to get somebody who understands it. Hotel TVs disable you from getting at the setup mode, offering a remote control which includes the special hotel menus and pay-per-view movie rentals. The last few hotel rooms I have stayed in have had widescreen TVs configured like this. Yet almost all the time, I see them configured so they take standard def TV programs, which are made for a 4:3 aspect ratio, and stretch them to fill the 16:9 screen. And they are usually made widescreen, which is great. Flat panel TVs are a big win in public places since they don't have the bulk and weight of the older ones, so this is no surprise, even in SDTV. Very commonly today I see widescreen TVs being installed, both HDTV and normal. (Note I have a simpler article for those just looking for advice on how to get their Widescreen TV to display properly.)
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