HDTV Forum

I recently bought a Panasonic 50

Your TV is a 16:9 display (1.78:1 ratio). Many movies are 2.35:1 Aspect Ratio so that even if you play them on a 16:9 display you'll get small letterbox bars top and bottom. The only way to get rid of them is to zoom the picture (if your BR player or TV supports that option) which will cut off part of the sides.

Just enjoy seeing the movie in it's OAR (original aspect ratio) with nothing stretched or missing and don't worry about it. If you have a dark room with a dark background they disappear anyway.

I don't mind the black lines so much, after doing some reading on different sites I was a little paranoid about leaving those black lines on the screen for the length of a movie. I heard the first 300 hours are the most critical for plasmas, so I have been watching everything full screen and on the cinema settings to keep the brightness levels down.

I don't think that's a problem with the newer plasmas.

Plasma and crt will burn in an image and it is not covered under warranty. Once there it is there forever. Good luck on leaving the black lines there.
I have a customer who has a 2007 set and he did not believe me as his version was this: if it is going to damage the set the video company would not make it that way.
He is sorry now as warranty says specific, no coverage for black bar burn in.
Now he wants to trade it in on a liquid crystal but I;m not able to give him any trade in for the set as it is worthless.
I offered him dealer cost on a new one, but he balks at that so he is watching a new set with burn marks on the screen. Live and learn.

As lickness states plasma is still susceptible to burn in although akirby is correct in that it has improved.

Lickness, are you stating your client has black bar burn in from 2.35 movies as that would be highly unusual. Black bars on the sides from hours upon hours of 4:3 content is common as dirt.

This is a problem with any content that does not fill the 16:9 screen to its edges, including regular widescreen DVDs, widescreen Hi Def DVDs, 4:3 analog programs displayed with pillar side bars, laserdiscs, 4:3 digital programs that come sandwitched with two pillar bars within a 16:9 image, etc.

Plasmas and CRTs are phosfor based displays that were always recommended to avoid prolonged viewing of fixed objects on the screen, such as black letterbox bars, black side pillars, fixed logos or graphical sections of the image like bloomberg and the other news channels with fixed bottom bars that contain moving text, video games scores/status, etc.

Although most plasmas today claim to have a protection circuitry, some that move a little bit the image so the pixels are not sitting there with the same content (black on this case), that is not 100% effective when 30% of the screen is black, whereby a shifted pixel in the center of the black area lands on another black pixel when shifted by the protection circuitry. In other words the approach would work better at the edges of the image adjacent to the black area.

Before HDTV was introduced in 1998 I had a 16:9 Toshiba CRT RPTV for about 6-7 years which I purchased exclusively to watch letterboxed laserdiscs, I never had one problem with the burn-in; I viewed 4:3 content usually expanded to fill the image at a tolerant geometry, but the set also have a way to change the color of the side bars to make it lighter, which I used, but when doing that the effect of contrast of the actual image gets diminished.

When I got my first CRT HDTV RPTV in 1998 when HDTV was introduced, it was a Pioneer Elite and most of the content I viewed was also letterboxed.

Both TVs are still in use by other people and in perfect conditions.

One thing to keep in mind is that the black bars on letterboxed movies (2.35:1 into 16:9 for example, or into 4:3 anamorphic such as DVD) are actually using part of the resolution of the media and display device on that area, they are not dead space.

In other words, the actual image is only using about 70% of the TV's resolution (and Blu-ray disc) capabilities limited by its 16:9 frame.

When one stretches the image to fill the frame of the TV, that not only looses part of the image on the sides and top/botton, depending on the stretch, but it has the effect of opening the grain of the image, like enlarging a photograph.

If the resolution of the original image was subpar to start with the stretch will make it even worst, especially if the image comes from a heavily compressed source such as satellite and cable.

I suggest to view the movie with bars to show the aspec ratio the director intended, and mix the viewing with other content that does not have the bars on that place all the time.

Although your case is not related to a projection solution, it is a CinemaScope related issue, and you will find more information in this article:

http://www.hdtvmagazine.com/articles/20 ... oncept.php


Best Regards,

Rodolfo La Maestra