 Why
Your Beautiful New LCD TV Won’t Work
Because it won’t show those letter-boxed movies on cable and/or from
your DVD correctly. At least if it’s like the Viewsonic we
bought and
returned this weekend. Irritated
Spiteful DiscussionWe’d been imagining in our jejune innocence
that
when
we got a new LCD TV, the ridiculously-enormous wide screen gadget would
display beautiful full-screen renditions of those letterboxed movies on
cable and DVD we’ve been generally-avoiding for the last five years
or
more. ... But no: The LCD TV you’re going to buy is
probably
designed to show high density format shows, the wonderful
incredibly-detailed new television format that neither you nor I could
identify if they paid us at more than 3’? ... That’s mostly
called
“HDMI TV” these days? ... The
format
that all
the monitors at MicroCenter were set to, displaying a sports network
program broadcast with sports-network-logo vertical borders left and
right in HD, because the original show isn’t
high def? ... Yes, that format. ... And perhaps, if you pay the cable
company for the new format, and you buy a new DVD player and all-new
DVDs at extortionate prices — except of course any old favorites
they
didn’t bother re-issuing — well, then maybe you can see them
full
screen
(assuming the HDMI copy-protection works
for the DVDs).
... But probably nothing you already have on cable/DVD will fill the screen. Digital
TVs are so incredibly advanced over those old boring ridiculously-cheaper
CRTs that, unlike the O.B.R.C CRT sets, the
resolution cannot
be arbitrarily adjusted: it’s difficult
to get
a good “zoom” without offensive “pixelation” effects
— blobby ugly
misshapen sickly pixels, with which many of us are familiar by now from
various triumphs of computer science, particularly in laptops. ... And
then again, if your old stuff looks awful, maybe you’ll pay more
extra
buck$ to get more new HD stuff....  Consequently,
all those idiotically letterboxed for - all - these - years movies
you’d
been expecting to see full screen will look like the picture over
there: a small image in the middle of the screen, with a black border
around it! ... On
our Viewsonic set, the border was considerably larger. ... And
of course, those black borders don’t “burn-in” to the
screen
like they
used-to — or maybe still do. ... But we don’t want to think
about
that....
I
stole the beautiful illustration from http://www.cnet.com/1991-7874_1-5140690-4.html,
where there’s a helpful discussion — although typically webishly
overoptimistic, since Cnet like everybody
else wants to sell this junk so they can get precious advertising. ...
They, for instance, imagine that you can use the zoom control to fix
this, so you’d get a slightly blurry image — that is, not at the beautiful high density resolution
— that nevertheless correctly
fills the
screen. ... And maybe the set you
buy will be able to do that! Ours
wasn’t. The Crux: Aspect
Ratio is Not EnoughActually, to
summarize this stupid and annoying problem, the letterboxed movies on
cable/DVD we’ve been squinting-at all these years are
in the correct aspect ratio mostly: their
vertical/horizontal proportions are correct
to fit on the new giant wide screen
— if they were the right size.
... But the cheap-s**t LCD TV technology is broken
and cannot show them full screen.
... Presumably because of issue #2 above —
and/or of course naked greed and collusion. ...
So
aren’t you glad you waited all these years to get your new giant
wide
screen won’t-work with anything you used-to-watch LCD TV? ... I know
we
are; we’re extremely gratified to know we’ve been dodging
the bullet
all these years in complete ignorance! ... And we only went on this
amazing adventure when our ancient boring
cheap TV finally failed the smoke test a few mornings ago while
we were pretending to exercise in the basement watching Nancy Drew! ...
She was just
about to discover the secret door in her
basement and, puff!, away
it went; darkness and a bad smell. ... Little scorch marks on the
antique amplifier I use to make the sound audible over the exercise
machines....  So we’ve reverted to an ancient
Trinitron I was
using for the old computers.... (But see below.)
Your
Mileage May VarySince
I am almost totally ignorant in this area — and proud of it! —
there might well be LCD TVs that’ll have the correct zoom control
to show
these
letterboxed movies correctly. The Viewsonic had a zoom menu item that
would show the movie too big,
with cut-off corners and unnecessary blurriness. ... I
suspect clever software — aka $ — could produce a variable
zoom that’d
show anything kind-of acceptably, but I really have no idea:
whether clever software could
do that, and whether it does,
and if so, how much you’d have to pay
these shameless hustlers to get to watch your old movies.... Viewsonic
“Support”During
our minor travails, we called the Viewsonic 800 number and talked to what
I’m pretty sure was a rent-a-support person. It reminded me of the
days a
time ago, when I came across the generic
computer card manual:
vendors felt the cheap computer junk we bought should come with a
manual, but of course you’d have to get someone who could read/write
and think to do that, so they took to just including a generic manual
that would cover any board, no
matter what its function! So much
more
efficient.... I don’t really mean to dis Viewsonic;
it’s their funeral. ... But I’m pretty sure when a purchaser
calls-up
about “why don’t letterboxed movies display right?” they
are well aware
of the problem, and are just hoping you’re stupid-enough to bamboozle
with ridiculous delays and endless procedures into thinking somehow
you’re at fault. ... We weren’t. The
Glorious History of Planned ObsolescenceAnd I have
wondered-about the LCD TVs. ... MicroCenter and Best Buy are filled to
the rafters with these
things, and yet I had a long time on the web finding anything about
this minor little aspect ratio/letterboxed difficulty — as the LOL
points-out, any little problem you have with an Ipod, for instance,
will be chittered-about endlessly on numerous forums. ... So the stores
are presumably filled with these things because they’re so
costly aka “high markup” — the store makes a lot
of money when they sell one
of them. And they don’t sell old
CRT
TVs anymore. ... That, of course, wouldn’t be because CRT TVs are
ridiculously cheaper and have better color? ... Oh no no there would never
be industry-wide collusion to force a bogus new format on us just so
they could sell expensive high-markup new gadgets? ... No matter how
unsuccessfully? ... Or that even ConsumerReports
in their 12/08 issue featuring “LCD & plasma TVs”, which
mentioned nothing about this obvious
problem, would be part of such a shameful and saddening conspiracy? ...
No I can’t believe that. ... Or that the
American automobile industry colluded for years on “planned
obsolescence” until a bunch of competitive Japanese cars showed-up
and,
with General Motors officially seeking protection these days, put them
out of business? ... No no that couldn’t happen.... Similarly,
it
couldn’t be possible that Microsoft and computer hardware manufacturers
have colluded for years on producing / adopting ever more powerful
versions of Windows which, mysteriously, will never run on the previous
generation of computer hardware? ... No no that couldn’t be. ...
Personally,
I am looking forward to the end of analog TV, due 2/17/09! ... But I can’t
believe that represents Congressional participation
in this pitiful format boosting. ... And indeed, for most of
us who get TV over cable, it’ll probably just be the usual incompetent
snafus for a few months or years. ... But for some large portion of the
population, it’ll be the end of broadcast TV. ... Just another nail
in
the coffin; people will be ever less-inclined to make the traditional
distinction between the dreary “lower” network channels and
the vast
sea of dreary “cable” offerings, already a mushy difference
that only
geezers tend to notice. ... Not to mention the internet.... The
TV networks think there’re big bucks in new broadcast services they
can
sell after the digital switch. ... We shall see. ... But what channel
is Katy Couric on @ YouTube?  Back to the Future!
Then
in the fullness of a few weeks, I found a $40 (!) 32“ CRT TV at
our local ”Northern Thrift“ emporium of all things —
on
sale! 50% off
$80! — and now our world of basement television is complete! ...
Sharp
apparently manufactured this beautiful device (model 32NS350) around
the year 2000, and it looks great! ... Still letter-boxed stupid cable
movies DVDs etc., but (1.) cheap, (2.) fills more
of the screen, and (3.) black bars won’t
burn into the CRT that much. ... Of course, they don’t burn into
the
LCD/Plasma screens. ... No, of course not. ... I mean, I haven’t
seen
reports of flat screen burn-in for at least
a few months. ... Well I just googled ”flat screen burnin“
and
there
they are; somebody says its just plasmas that do that; but then someone
else says just the opposite. ... So, you
guess; ... I’m assuming they burn-in.... There’s a low-rent
audio-out on the Sharp which doesn’t emit signal unless
the main volume is up. ... But my cruddy noise-overcoming HI-FI
isn’t that great anyway, and I turn it up and get adequate volume
from
the HI-FI and good presence from the not-shoddy Sharp TV speakers;
maybe I’ll turn up the bass on the amplifier, and get four-channel
sound! ... And yes; the set was monstrously
heavy; I sustained a finger injury, when it bit me!... On
the web, I encountered many happy scamsters selling an
“original remote control” for my giant set, which wasn’t
of course just
a
general-purpose programmable control that might work with your TV or
any TV or who knows? ... In any event, I had two
programmable controls in the basement which I managed to setup so they’d
run
the thing. ... Also widely available on the internet were
“service manuals” for the set, which may well have been such,
or may
have been three sheets of mimeographed paper rendered in a pdf —
and
why weren’t there “user” manuals? ... I’d guess
because
the pitiful
marks for these dubious products want to fix
their broken
TVs. ... And I noted that the “driver” subscription guys apparently
have run out of gullible idiots for “Windows drivers” and are
joyously
promoting service manual rackets.... So I figure the Sharp’ll
last at least a few more years, through the digital changeover and the
seemingly-inevitable collapse of the flat screen market as more
purchasers figure-out you can’t watch anything but some stupid premium
HDMI — and eventually the flat screens’ll
go for $39.95, which would
be much less annoying when they don’t display my movies right, and/or
burn-in black bars. ... Actually I’m not sure HDMI
will
render OK on these things; or at least I see occasional letter-boxing
and other aberrations in the stores, where they presumably have the
wherewithal to get the right program material.... —
The
Nancy Drew fan
Monday, December 22, 2008 2:06 pm
|
And
what is ASCII, you ask musingly? It’s like the illustration (on the
right! ... on the left is a charming 8mm movie camera that no-doubt
frolicked its way through a relentlessly gay existence until it
wound-up in a junk store).
When I moved into the wonderful world of 32-bit computing, I weaned
myself from my precious Sidekick 1.56 — which runs poorly in
Windows anyway — graduating to SK95, Palm Pilot, ad astra.
...
But I missed the ASCII chart! Of course Windows is beyond all that
now, Unicoding, Kanji, ANSI something whatever, but I still write
humble backward-looking code, and just the other day I wanted to know
what an ACK was, for instance. So I finally broke down and wrote the
program, which consists essentially of borrowed screens. PgUp,
PgDown, ^X, ^E, ^R, and ^C move between the screens and, in Windows
95 or 98 or something, up and down arrows (Delphi 16 was too cheap).
Home and End do the expected; and just for old time’s sake,
ESC
exits. It’s resizable if you, like me, are encountering more
and
more tiny screens these days; or press 2, 3, 4, 5 to magnify in whole
amounts — but typing the letter “O” or
numeral
“1” or zero 
returns
it to its startup size.... Of course, it
will
blow-up your computer, so don’t download it.... (And then by
Thursday, July 19, 2001 10:47 am it turned-out SideKick runs fine in
W98 — in a window by itself like Bill Gates intended
— and
I used it happily for many years that way, eventually wandering over to
SideKick95, itself significantly obsolete these days; but I still run
ASCII to find those
codes....)
It’s
highly unlikely you would have the same reaction but, still, if for
some reason you’ve been beating yourself on the head trying
to
copy files around your 
Actually
OV looks something like Midnight Commander, the charming Linux/Unix
file manager (without which, incidentally, Linux is even more
annoying than otherwise) which, I gather, looks like Norton Commander
or something. But then those guys probably got their ideas same place
I did, the PC Magazine utilities D and CO, which I
mutilated
for several years (88-91) and then I went crazy and wrote OV, mostly
to escape the assembly-language of D/CO.
W9X
TIPS ’N’
TRICKS:
You can make short-cuts to OV on the W9x desktop and on those program
menus in the usual windowish ways, just browsing to the OVL.EXE
executable when Windows wants a program. The resulting DOS box that
starts when you click on the short-cut can have its properties
amended in what I thought were useful ways (click on that piece of
paper with a finger pointing at it on the top of the DOS box): (a.)
Program tab: check “Close on exit” so you can just
click
the window away; (b.) Screen tab: set “initial
size” to 50
lines; (c.) Misc. tab: check “Mouse/QuickEdit”
(mouse is
useless in OV anyway, and this way you can copy the text on the
screen quickly); uncheck
“Termination/Warn if still active”; again, so you
can click
the window away; so far I haven’t detected any resource
wastage
but your mileage etc.
use
“OV
-i”.
OV.TXT
contains endless agonizing detail — much of it erroneous by now!
— on everything in genuine ASCII text
— which can be viewed with OV itself by finding the file and
pressing Enter in the supplied simple text viewer/editor; which
editor has valuable help at F1 a novelty in those dark days. (TDEx
viewer exits with F3.) ... And now as a special treat, “OVL
/?” or better “OVL >file” will
produce a helpful
summary of the all the options I could remember....