Get the Best Picture From Your HDTV
After leaving the CRT world, a few visual problems may pop up thay may leave wondering if your new TV is worth he investment. ecoustic's article covers major problems that almost anyone would notice and luck for us are easy to fix. By following this few rules, it should get you to 80 to 90% of the way to perfect picture quality. Most people settle for this and are quite happy. Going the last 10 to 20% is where you start really researching the brand of TV, ISF calibration, DVD calibration discs (alot would argue that this is a basic tweak that should be performed regardless) and other things along those lines.
From the article:
The "Big, Heavyset" Look
The Problem:
Everyone on screen looks like they've been hitting the donut counter or
hoovering up too much good food. In almost all cases, someone has
inadvertently activated the "stretch" mode on a new widescreen TV. This
tells the set to digitally expand a standard, squarish non-HD 4:3 image
to fill the widescreen aspect ratio so that no black borders appear at
the sides of the screen. It's nice not to see black borders, but
"stretch" modes will also tend to expand the horizontal girth of anyone
on-screen. Sometimes the actors in the center may be left untouched,
but as they exit left or right, they stretch to larger proportions.
The Fix:
To cancel this mode, look for a picture size control on your TV's
remote and go through the options until figures on-screen look normal.
Set it to "4:3" for non-high-definition TV images. The widescreen
aspect ratio is part of the HDTV standard, so if you are watching HDTV
programming, then set the TV for "16:9" or "widescreen." With the right
setting, your HDTV should display conventional non-HD 4:3 images with
black borders to each side (get used to them!) and automatically go to
undistorted widescreen images with an HDTV program.