31-05-2022, 05:54 PM
(31-05-2022, 11:37 AM)johnnyboy Wrote:(31-05-2022, 11:35 AM)CameronYoung Wrote: May i ask (as I'm far too young to remember it, and we had Sky anyway), if you watched a 4:3 picture (say, from the analogue), how would a widescreen TV deal with it; it would it stretch it, pillar box it or crop it?
IME, it generally stretched it to a 16:9 picture. The older Sky boxes use to switch to the correct aspect ratio (if not overruled by your TV preferences) but I could never get that to work for some reason from the Sky HD age onwards. In those cases, I switch to 4:3 using the TV remote because I can't stand stretchivision.
The default for most TVs would have been stretchyvision.
Sky+HD boxes need to be put in either Auto or 576p mode for the 4:3 switching to work correctly. Otherwise they will force everything into a 16:9 frame.
This option was removed for Sky Q and probably doesn't exist in Glass.
Of course any TV set up correctly should display 4:3 material... in 4:3, which is black bars either side. However many TVs have various kinds of zoom on them to manipulate the picture in many different ways, most of which are God-awful and nobody in their right mind would ever consider normal.
But widescreen came along, widescreen TVs were set up in shops showing 4:3 material stretched to 16:9 (often because widescreen broadcasts didn't exist prior to about 1998) and that was presented as "proper" widescreen high quality picture.