1:33 disc playing as anamorphic... (1 Viewer)

[astroboy01]

Not where to post this, as I'm not sure where the problem lies, so: We recently watched "Twelve O'Clock High", the original film from 1950. It's a 1:33 film, says so on the box, and we watched this same disc before, and it played as such. This time, though, it played with a 16:9 aspect ratio, and looked undistorted only when the projector was set to anamorphic. Of course, the top and bottom of the picture was cut off. I'm baffled as to how this could happen. Right afterwards, I put in "Citizen Kane," and it played fine at 1:33; replaced it with "Twelve O'Clock High" again, and the latter was still anamorphic. Lots of our DVDs are 1:33, as are a lot of the ones we get from Netflix, and I've never seen this before.

The last time we watched it, it was on a Harman Kardon 31, and an Infocus 7205. This time, it was on a Sony BDP-BX1, and a Benq W5000. I tried it with the HK again, now hooked up to a Toshiba LCD; it played fine. Is there some weird incompatibility with the Sony Blu-ray player? That's the only thing I can think of, but it still doesn't make sense.

Thanks,
Jeff

 

[Mark-P]

I've got the Sony BDP-BX1. What happens is if non-anamorphic DVDs are flagged as "letterbox" the Sony will zoom them so that the letterbox bars are eliminated. This feature cannot be defeated. 12 O'Clock High must have been flagged as "letterbox" in error. The only way to defeat it is to set the Sony to 4X3 and then have your Benq projector generate the sidebars. What a pain! I really wish Sony would do a firmware update that gives us the option to zoom letterbox movies rather than doing it automatically.

 

[astroboy01]

I just looked; the 4:3 setting is right there in the manual. That's what I get for not going past the Quick Start guide when we got the player. Thanks for the tip.

Jeff