ITV Regional News - going widescreen?

Is the ITV Regional News set to go widescreen sooner than we thought.

We've had some dodgy ration switching on Central News (West) for a few weeks now, with some programmes 14:9 letterbox - and at the beginning of ITV Wales News (including the titles!) was in 16:9 squeezed to 4:3.

Some of the regions are widescreen capable (e.g. Tyne Tees does the promos for NE Tonight in Widescreen). Probably just a transmission error.

Border does the promo in 14:9 cropporama

Isn't UTV already 16:9 - and of course HTV and Anglia both cropped/zoomed their 4:3 gallery output to 14:9 pillarbox for their digital outlets (in the same way that the analogue BBC One regional areas do) until the integrated ITV News was introduced / playout was moved to LNN?

I believe the widescreen capable regions are:
- Central (all sub-regions)
- Meridian (all sub-regions)
- UTV
- London

I am fairly certain that HTV, Border and Granada are 4:3.

Could anyone add to this list?

I've heard that Calendar is having a bit of a technical upgrade quite soon, so it's quite likely it could be getting widescreen capable kit.

I think London has always been wide?

Well whenever GMTV link to a guest speaking from a regional studio outside of London, the picture is in widescreen from virtually all of them -- even subregional studios such as Exeter.

For some of the regions the picture is cropped from 4:3 to 16:9.

GMTV convert all their 4:3 sources to full-width 16:9 - so the only way of telling whether the source was originally 4:3 or was proper 16:9 is to see how soft it is...

I think the old London Tonight studios on the South Bank were upgraded to be 16:9 capable quite a while ago, when they moved from Beta SP to Beta SX as their VT format.

Not sure if the current London Tonight studios at ITN are 16:9 capable - I expect they are - but can't be certain. (It is almost impossible to buy 4:3 only kit these days - but to go 16:9 properly you do need extra kit to convert between formats)

Scotland Today seem to have no problems with using widescreen (used on GMTV). Much better!