http://www.dvdhometheateronline.com/lcd-movie/
Is it usual for an LCD TV to have bars on the top and bottom when playing a widescreen movie?
I just got Vizio 32 inch LCD and when I use normal mode to view a widescreen movie I get bars all around. When I switch to wide mode, the bars on top don't change; it just stretches out to the sides and distorts the image. Are they all like that?
Yes. The TV is doing the right thing.
First, you need to set your DVD player to tell it you have a 16:9 TV.
After that you will still likely get some black bars, but you won't have the distortion.
You get the black bars top and bottom because
the TV has a fixed 16:9 proportion between height and width - also called 1.78 (this is simply 16 divided by 9). However most movies are not made in this exact proportion. You're looking at a movie that was made in a slightly wider proportion, or "aspect ratio". Most movies are like this. I just looked a widescreen DVD on my shelf - it said the format was 2.38. This is considerably "wider" than 1.78, so the TV is going to have to put those bars there. The DVD provides no "picture" information to fill those spaces in.
The alternative would be to allow the TV to zoom in on the picture just enough so the top and bottom of the picture meet the top and bottom of the display. However the picture would then be too wide for the display. Yes, the pictture would fill the display, and then some - the display would have to cut off the image at left and right, just as widescreen movies have been cut off for years to fit on our 4:3 TVs, only without a human to make better decisions. I really doubt you want it to do this.
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