Help: Blu-ray player windowboxes fullscreen discs! (1 Viewer)

[Bill Santagata]

I just bought a Blu-ray player (Sony BDP-S185) although I do not yet have an HD TV (I'm sure I"ll be getting one soon and in the meantime want to be able to stop buying DVDs).
It's hooked up to a standard ratio television and when I play a movie originally shot in Academy ratio, the image does not fill the screen as it should but has black bars on the top and bottom to create a widescreen TV ratio, then black bars on the left and right to create the Academy ratio.
By fiddling with the settings I can only get rid of the bars on the top and bottom but the image is stretched vertically.
How can I get the disc to play normally?
Thanks for your help.

 

[Keith Paynter]

Bill - try these settings:
Your TV should be selected as a 4:3 aspect ratio in the player's "TV Type" settings. "Screen Format" should be "Fixed Aspect Ratio". "DVD Aspect Ratio" should be "Letterboxed".

 

[Michael Rogers]

A blu ray of a 4:3 academy ratio movie will have black bars onnthe side as part of the image because HD's ratio is natively 16:9
http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Wizard-of-Oz-Blu-ray/6366/
as seen in the screen grabs of this Wizard Of Oz blu ray review.
When the BD player is set for an old 4:3 TV, the BD player doesn't know any better and will add letterbox bars on top and bottom like any other 16:9 ratio image.
But, players should usually have a zoom function to compensate for that. On my Panasonic it's called "side cut" becuase it zooms to the middle and cuts off the sides. I suspect it is there precisely because of your issue. Your Sony should have some sort of similar zoom function.