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Re: SD programming and my Samsung 46" LCD
While some brick and mortar retailers don't carry calibration discs, you can get Avia Guide to Home Theater and Digital Video Essentials at pretty much any on-line DVD dealer. Either will do the job. They will both also let you adjust the sound on your audio system. Some people find Avia much easier to use than DVE. I've used both and have no strong preference.
[quote]What's your opinion on allowing the cable box to stretch the image to eliminate the pillarbox?[quote]
You can't "eliminate" the pillarbox columns for 4:3 material and keep the aspect ratio correct, anymore than you could eliminate the letterbox
bars on material wider than 1.78:1. Any material that isn't exactly the same shape as you screen is going to have to be adjusted. that means letterbox or pillarbox for material the deviates significantly, like 2.35:1 and greater or 1.37:1 and probably a slight crop/zoom or opening of the mattes, for material that deviates only slightly, like 1.85:1.
But you can't eliminate the pillarbox columns and still see the original aspect ratio. You are either going to have to use one of several stretch or zoom modes your set probably provides (the latter of which will crop off the top and bottom of the frame while zooming the center - magnifying the inherent flaws in the material even more) or live with the pillarbox.
I do find grey pillarbox bars to be distracting, especially when I'm watching in a darkened room. But both my TV and my HD cable DVR have settings that allow you to control the color of the pillarbox columns and since burn-in is not an issue for my LCoS set (one reason I bought it, in addition to the better blacks and brighter screen) I've set the columns to black. Not at all distracting when I'm watching a 1.37:1 clasasic like Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz, or even 1.33:1 TV fare on the History Channel or A&E. (All SD sources, by the way. The DVDs look better than they ever have on my new set, and post-DVE the SD cable channels are perfectly watchable and not really any worse than they were on my 56" analog CRT-based RPTV. It is the size of the screen as much as anything else that makes NTSC TV look bad, as noted earlier in this thread.)
Regards,
Joe
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