British Television (Widescreen)

Sometimes they just don't bother with any of it at all and big names like "Big Brother's Little Big Medium Small Sofa Chair Dog Cat Window Toilet" get put into just one or two lines on their Menus.

A question from a non-expert, what are the safe zones used for sports graphics, as the top and bottom of them aways seem to get cut off?

All graphics should be safe within a certain limit.
Different TVs have different levels of overscan so some will chop more of the picture off than others. If the TV has an big enough overscan (and the graphics are "well inside" the industry safe areas) it will still chop them off. Likewise, a TV with less overscan will show more picture but graphics will look more inward.

Therefore to answer your question, your TV has too much overscan on the top and bottom of the picture. This is common, though it may be possible to alter this through hidden engineering menus. Overscan amounts can vary from TV to TV even of the same make, however this can be through the settings or the size of the case around the visible screen. In the latter case is not really a lot you can do about it but the former you may be able to, though of course if you do fiddle you may end up with no picture at all.

Because 14:9 is only available on a small number of DTT boxes - most offer only 4:3 and 16:9, as do all Sky and cable boxes.


They're also the only broadcaster I can think of which puts a 16:9 DOG in the corner of the screen, rather than making it 4:3 safe which leaves it floating in the middle of nowhere when in 16:9.


I still find the funniest widescreen morons to be those of 10 years ago - almost nothing was broadcast in widescreen so generally such people watched things in squashed 16:9 - all the while prattling on about how 'much more natural' the widescreen picture is. And then even those rare 16:9 broadcasts were actually 4:3 letterbox, so zooming in to make it fill the wide screen at the correct aspect ratio dropped the vertical resolution down to about 350 lines - and again the same idiots would use their low resolution picture as an example of how wonderful widescreen was compared to the 576 lines present in a 'backwards' 4:3 transmission.

And of course, by watching things in stretchy vision when programmes were broadcast 16:9 (in a 4:3 frame) they still had it squashed - and have the bars top and bottom too!


Actually, that's another thing that annoys me. Now we're in 16:9 alot of ads and broadcasters still use the black bars top and bottom to give the widescreen effect - even though the image is in widescreen already!

if only they still transmitted the Test Card so you could check such things

Eh? You'd still display the same number of lines (~432), they'd just be spread further apart vertically.

David

They do on E4 and More4 but it's 4:3 safe (just about) when it's the T4 DOG on Channel 4.

and it looks all the worse for it!

T4's DOG is very very very very safe safe it's like it's in the 15% area, rather then generally the 10%.

On 4:3 programmes it's quite far away from the edge but on 16:9 programmes it's up to the edge of my screen.

Agree they should get rid of 14:9 broadcasts unless the programme was specifically made in that format. 4:3 it should be broadcast in 4:3 , 16:9 in 16:9 and really wide movies should maintain their original aspect ratio.

I personally can't understand how anyone would want to stretch 4:3 into a widescreen TV. Everything just looks so wrong.