Question Regarding Viewing HD Signal on 4:3 Screen (1 Viewer)

[Scotty D]

I have a Sony Wega 36 inch XBR400 and have a standard RCA satellite receiver for receiving DirecTv. I'm thinking about purchasing an HD converter but have a couple of questions/concerns. First, are there any STBs that convert an HD signal from 16:9 to 4:3 format? While there may be some broadcasts that I would like to view in letterbox, there are others (TV shows primarily) that I would rather have fill the entire screen. If you can in fact convert from a 16:9 to a 4:3 HD signal, is there any loss in resolution? And finally, I have heard some complaints about Sony tvs automatically letter boxing HD signals, even when the signals are broadcast in a 4:3 format, resulting in black lines on all four sides of the picture. If anyone has any thoughts on these issues, or recommendations of STBs that may suit my needs, I'd greatly appreciate hearing from you. Thanks for your time.

 

[Michael St. Clair]

Scotty,

Lots can, including your DTC-100. It will let you stretch or crop (or letterbox) the image assuming a 4:3 display device.

However, the problem is that the Sonys automatically lock 1080i and 540p to 16:9. Some sets do allow you to watch 1080i/540p as 4:3, but not the Sonys. Personally, I think this is a good feature even though I would never use it.

Your choice is to watch these programs in 480i via the svideo output, or for better quality get a settop box that can downconvert HDTV to 480p.

Now, if the network is broadcasting their SDTV programming as windowboxed 16:9 (a bad practice), it becomes more difficult and I'm not sure if the stretch/crop modes will handle this.

 

[Scotty D]

Thanks Michael. That's a bummer about Sony's inability to view HD in 4:3. Appreciate the info, though.