Do you prefer the widescreen format for TV?

Personally, I don't like widescreen. I much prefer the good ol' 4:3 aspect ratio.

So you'd rather go to the cinema and watch a square picture rather than a widescreen that stretches the span of the wall?

Hes talking about on the TV not at the movies. and 4:3 is not exactly square either.

But how can you like it for one thing, and not another?

Both mediums show films etc. so why should TV be in 4:3? Widescreen is naturally the way forward.

And, in comparison to 16:9, 4:3 certainly is very square.

Jay, you can only compare apples with apples; not apples with oranges.

What suits cinema doesn't necessarily suit TV - at least not for everything.

News, for example - the presenters will still appear in the horizontal centre of the screen and the extra width only shows more set or more blank wall.

Graphics similarly don't benefit.

Only movies benefit from this, and that's only because movies get made with wider and wider pictures - many of them much WIDER than 16:9. That doesn't mean TV should follow suit.

I'm not completely against widescreen, but I don't see how making TV widescreen makes it better, and why all types of TV should be seen as "having to be in widescreen to make it current".

I too think that Widescreen is wasted on television. I don't think i've seen a program on TV in widescreen that has actually benefitted from the widescreen picture. If anything it just creates unnecessary space in a scene. You want to focus on the action, not on the background.

Also I think there should be a difference between films and television.

Call me old fashioned but I do prefer 4:3, even though I do own a widescreen television and Sky.

Oh, so drama, or comedy, or documentaries don't?

Widescreen more accurately reflects the 'aspect ratio' of the human eye and I find it to be a much more pleasing image size generally. Clearly there are some genres that suit it less so, but there have been countless drama, comedy and light entertainment programmes that have benefited from 16:9. Having said that, the vast majority of programmes that are shot in widescreen are still shot to 14:9 or even 4:3 safe, which means that directors cannot maximise the frame to it's fullest extent. Film directors are not restricted in this way and have a much freer reign in creative composition.

As consumers, we get sold a lot of gimmicky crap, but 16:9 widescreen television has surely got to be right up there with the Austin Allegro's square steering wheel.

It's sold on the premise of two things, both of which in my mind are as ridiculous as each other:

Firstly, that it enables you to see 'movies the way they were meant to be seen' - except that it doesn't. Contrary to popular belief, 16:9 is NOT a standard aspect ratio to make a general release cinema film in. It would be entirely out of convention for a director to choose 16:9 for a mainstream film. Fact.

Therefore, when showing movies, a 16:9 screen has the same problem as a 4:3 screen in that the source is the wrong size for the screen and you have a choice of showing it in it's native format with black bars top & bottom or cropping it to fit the smaller screen. In the past, cropping meant that a 4:3 'pan & scan' edit of the film would be made for TV. In this edit, a director (if not the director) would go through the film, moving a 4:3 frame over the image so that the viewer always saw the most important part of the action. With only a few exceptions, this worked pretty well.

Since 16:9 came along however, this doesn't seem to be done any more; now they just zoom and show a 16:9 centre cutout of the original frame - a process directly comparable to setting a digibox to display a 4:3 centre cutout of a 16:9 image, something which is pretty much universally accepted to be a bad thing to do. And of course frequently that also means that people are often left watching a 4:3 centre cutout of a 16:9 image, which itself is merely a 16:9 centre cut out of a much wider image (such as 2.35:1).

So, considering that 16:9 is not generally the ratio in which a film is made, and that the way cinema films are presented now is far inferior to the way they were presented in the past, I don't buy that argument.

Secondly, the old chestnut that it's 'more natural' because it's 'closer to the human of vision'. Firstly, I can't think how many widescreen owners use some sort of stretchyvision mode to make a 4:3 (or 14:9) image fill the screen, so for a lot of people widescreen is far from natural.

But secondly, the human field of vision is curved, eliptical, and much, much wider than 16:9. A 16:9 view of the world would still be pretty square and restricted. I grant you that it is better for your eyes to be able to look at something which fills more of your field of vision and so on the face of it 16:9 appears to be a step in the right direction, but upon closer inspection it's not. A television set (unless you've got cash (and floorspace) to burn and have some huge projection model) is still, to your eyes, a small dot in the corner of the room. Your eyes are still converging on a central point, and a 16:9 shaped central point is not appreciability different to a 4:3 central point as far as saving your eyes goes.

The only time when you benefit from watching a wider screen is if it is filling your field of vision, and the only time you get that is in the cinema.

And since we're on the cinema again, have you ever considered where all this stuff about the 'golden ratio' and how widescreen is better for your eyes came from? Umm, it came from 1950's cinema. Until the 50's, most cinema films were made in a ratio that, while not necessarily 4:3, in contemporary times is best described as '4:3 like' (for lack of a better term). Seeing that TV was taking off and feeling somewhat threatened by it, cinema chains needed something else to offer their customers.

Colour? Yes, but colour TV was not far behind (indeed, American colour TV had landed whilst some cinema films were still stuck in B/W). Apart from that, the only other thing they could offer which would make a sufficiently big impact to keep people in their cinemas was a bigger picture. But how do you make it bigger? Scaling up screens in the same ratio was impractical. What they could do however is scale them in one direction only, sideways, which made the picture bigger by making the screen wider. Hence along came widescreen. Sold on the premise that it was better for your eyes/more natural/everything else that we hear today. Widescreen TV is sold to us on the basis of recycled 1950's marketing spiel, and marketing spiel which can only be applied to huge cinema screens.

So both major arguments in favour of widescreen I consider to be invalid, but surely widescreen is at least no worse than 4:3, right? I disagree with that actually. A lot of modern day TV shots are contrived; when you actually just want a single person in shot, you now need to have a bowl of fruit or something next to them in order to fill out the frame to stop it from looking empty. Very, very, few programmes genuinely benefit from being in widescreen, and even those would still not be significantly disadvantaged by being made in 4:3.

And on the equipment side of things, I don't see widescreen TV's as being 'bigger' for most people, I just seem them as being shorter, or smaller in other words. All too often these days I see someone's main front room TV set, 'the big telly' as being some daft looking widescreen model which stands barely 2 feet off the ground and has a picture little more than 13/14" high. When I look around the shops for a picture with the same height as the 29" 4:3 set in our front room I only ever seem to find huge gas plasma/projection sets which cost an arm and a leg and would eat up serious amounts of floorspace.

To me, 16:9 TV's aren't generally any wider than their 4:3 counterparts, they are just shorter - because that was the only way to approach widescreen and still produce sets of a practical size with a reasonable price tag.

It's amazing how much people have been taken in by 16:9; they're being sold a set which lets you see films 'as they were shown in the cinema' even though almost no films are made in 16:9, are being given the advice that widescreen is better because it's 'closer to the human field of vision, more natural, and better for your eyes' even though this is market-speak from 50 years ago intended to be applied to huge screens which fill your field of vision, not a TV in the corner of the room, and also people are led to believe that they now have a bigger picture because it is wider, when in a lot of cases the picture is wider only by being made shorter.

As you can tell therefore, widescreen is not something I've got much time for. I will buy a 16:9 set only when it's no longer possible to buy a 4:3 one. Rant over

I am indeed referring to TV. I do think widescreen works well on a cinema's large screen, I just don't feel it's suitable for a pokey little box in the corner of the room.

How would you prefer to watch movies on television?

I don't have anything against widescreen, excpet when old 4:3 footage is cropped- which sadly happens all too often.