I’ve had an HDTV for a while now. (2 or 3 years… can’t remember) I love it and don’t think i could/would ever go back to SD. Its a lot like the dial-up to broadband switch that most of us went through. Within the last couple of years I decided to subscribed to Cox’s digital cable so that i could receive their HD service. The service has slowly expanded from 10 or so channels to pretty much all of the major networks. (To numerous to count) Now i can receive all my favorite networks such as Discovery, Sci-Fi, Cartoon Network (Adult Swim), TNT, HGTV, Etc in HD. Or so i thought.

While for the most part the service is good, there are several things that annoy the crap out of me. The first is what i like to call STRETCH-O-VISION.

As you can see the stretched version makes the video/picture look like complete crap. Whoever decided that this was an acceptable practice is seriously messed up in the head. It should be fairly easy to explain to customers that the reason not all of their shows are shown in 16:9 is because some of the shows were created before 16:9 widescreen format was standardized. Any rational person will be able to understand this. The fact that network television companies use stretch-o-vision tells me that they think their viewers are complete idiots who are incapable of understanding the problem.

The other thing networks do that annoys the crap out of me is showing a 16:9 HD show in letterbox SD at 4:3. Don’t know what that techno-jargin means? Allow me to show you:

As you can see they’ve taken a perfectly good HD show (In this case Star Trek Enterprise) and simply broadcast the same letterbox 4:3 signal to both their HD channel and their SD channel. So now i get to watch a 16:9 HD show in 4:3 SD letterbox. WHY?!!?!? Can they not afford to broadcast the show in HD? Or even at 16:9? I would be perfectly happy to see it at 16:9 even if it was not HD. I’m sure they same screwed up technology that brought us Stretch-o-vision could blow up a 4:3 letterbox signal to 16:9. All they have to do is zoom in.

I just don’t understand why these networks felt the need to even purchase an HD channel from the cable or satellite providers if they weren’t ready to broadcast in HD. Sci-fi channel for example has maybe one or two shows in HD. The rest are SD in stretch-o-vision or this screwed up letterbox 4:30 format.