HD in Hotels (1 Viewer)

Over the past few years, most of the hotels/motels have installed wide screen TV's. How come they don't use a HD feed, but use a horribly stretched/squeezed SD picture that has no resemblance to reality? The menu controls are disabled, so you can't adjust it to OAR, so you have to sit there and watch this stupid picture. It is the same at TV's in bars, restaurants and waiting areas. It seems that as long as the general public accepts these distorted images, they will never change. I wish the TV makers would make it so that you can't stretch the picture. Watch it in original aspect ratio or cough up the few extra bucks and get the HD feed. It's still free if you use an antenna. Thanks for letting me rant.

It's a mystery I've wondered the past couple years. In some cases their cable boxes and cables aren't digital capable.

Drives me nuts to. Every hotel we stayed at during our recent vacation was like this. I honestly wonder if some people don't know the difference.

I went over to a friend's house once and he had a movie on... all stretched out. "What the hell is this?!" I exclaimed and grabbed his remote and set it to 16:9 and he and his wife were all "ooooh! That looks better!"

I'm finding that most bars and restaurants have now adopted HD, but yeah, hotels are another story. The Hampton Inn that I stay in regularly for business only just got HD within the last 3 months after upgrading to HD capable televisions about 3 years ago. I think we'll start seeing it more in the near future. Other than the real dive hotels...

Last night I was watching "Armageddon" on FX in SD on a widescreen at the Holiday Inn Express.

At least I think. It might be a very, very low quality digital signal. I didn't notice obvious stretching of an SD picture, but there's a lot of digital or compression noise. It's much lower quality than I'd think it should be.

Originally Posted by DaveF /t/322830/hd-in-hotels#post_3959670
Last night I was watching "Armageddon" on FX in SD on a widescreen at the Holiday Inn Express.

At least I think. It might be a very, very low quality digital signal. I didn't notice obvious stretching of an SD picture, but there's a lot of digital or compression noise. It's much lower quality than I'd think it should be.

Click to expand...

Probably being broadcast in letterbox and the picture was zoomed in. I notice in some places the sd broadcast is the same as in HD, but letterboxed. Zoom takes care of the letterbox without distortion. It's the stretching I hate. I can put up with poor quality as I am not there that long. Just hate the stretch. It just amazes that people thinks this is OK.