Best Buy Circular This Week...Or, Has The Rock Morphed? (1 Viewer)

[James Edward]

All too frequently, I go into stores that squeeze, zoom, stretch, or otherwise distort widescreen images.

This week, it appears that the Best Buy circular has used the wrong mode in it's ads for a whole page of 16x9 sets.

If I were a casual observer, and on the fence about buying a set, this might tip me to the negative.

 

[Scott Simonian]

I work at a Best Buy here in Fresno California. Most people dont seem do give a rat ef about proper aspect ratio at all and just want to use the "whole" screen.

 

[SethH]

I haven't seen the ad, but I've noticed that most circulars have a footnote that says something about how the images shown on the tv's are just pictures overlaid on the picture of the tv and has nothing to do with the picture quality of the tv. Which really just makes it even funnier if it is incorrect.

 

[DaveF]

Haven't they been doing this for a few years now?

 

[MickeS]

Yes, the 16x9 images in the ad are just squeezed 4x3 images. It's always been like that, except when they reverse it and put a real 16x9 image in, then they cut the sides off of that same picture in the 4x3 set ads.

/Mike

 

[brentl]

Mike

at least that would make sense, show the public what they are missing. Hey, maybe BB is actually trying tio show people the horrors of cropping!

Who am I kidding

B

 

[Tony-B]

Here you go...

 

[Richard Travale]

Which is what most people will have to endure once widescreen sets are all that's available. They have been buying P&S releases and they won't be replacing them so they will just use the stretch mode to "fill their screens"

 

[Tony-B]

Richard, that's one of the arguments I use when trying to explain the benefits of buying widescreen DVDs.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

When I've been to BB, they generally have a 16:9 NTSC source running via RF and coax to the TVs on display -- all of them, regardless of resolution or aspect ratio. Thereby everything except 16:9 SD TVs is made to look bad or weird. So yes, I'm not surprised to see this kind of thing in their flyers. I remember testing the "squeeze mode" on a set there, and having the Monterey Bay Aquarium logo [which is like the SACD logo ] go from a diostorted ellipse to a circle. You'd think they'd want to show off their equipment to good effect, but no... :rolleyes