Haggai

Non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs: zoom with the TV or with the DVD player?

This is my first post here, and this has probably been addressed in some earlier thread. I have a 16X9 widescreen TV, and I'm wondering what's the best way to watch non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs. I can use the zoom function on my TV or on my DVD player--which one do people prefer for re-framing the picture on discs like that? Here's my equipment, if that makes much of a difference for this question:

48" Mitsubishi WS-48313 TV
Panasonic SA-HT700 DVD player

I'm just wondering about what will usually give me a better picture. I know that for the menus and subtitles, DVD zoom is better because it leaves those things fully visible on the screen instead of being partly cropped off, as they are with the TV zoom.

JohnnyG

You'll really have to compare and make your own decision on this. Different model TVs and different model DVD players will have different quality zooms (is "zooms" a word ).

Jeff Gatie

A non-anamorphic DVD should be zoomed on the TV with the zoom mode that does no stretching, only zoom and crop.

Haggai

I already managed to figure out which zoom modes don't do any stretching ("zoom" on my DVD player and "expand" on my TV, which uses "zoom" for something else).

I guess I'll end up just choosing whatever looks better to me, but I was mostly wondering what other people's experience with this has been. I also don't have much experience deciding about things like this, in terms of what to watch out for. Should I just be looking at the top and bottom for the effects of the cropping, or maybe there could be some other differences on the sides?

Allan Jayne

DVD player zoom scales (reformats) the inner 360 rows of pixels onto all 480 scan lines. This gives a smoother picture overall but there may be visible kinks in diagonal lines and edges because 360 does not divide evenly into 480. TV zoom usually spaces out the inner 360 scan lines more, giving more uniform diagonals but gaps between scan lines may be more noticeable.

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm

Cameron Yee

It will vary with equipment. For example, I own two DVD players that scale non-anamorphic material - the Toshiba 4800 and the Bravo D1. I was not impressed with the Toshiba's "zoom" quality so used my Toshiba RPTV's display mode or just left it in 4:3. However the Bravo D1 does an amazing job at zooming so I use the player instead of the television.