New Toy

We bought a new widescreen TV. It's a Panasonic TX28DK1 if anyone's interested in such details.

There's one feature that I'm very impressed by. That's its intelligent picture resizing algorithm. By looking at the amount of of black screen around the picture it calculates whether the transmission is in 16:9, 14:9 or 4:3 and adjusts the picture size appropriately. It can even handle the difference between 16:9 anamorphic broadcasts and the kind of "widescreen" tranmissions that you used to see on analogue channels where they just put large black bands at the top and bottom of the picture.

Only one small problem. For 4:3 broadcasts it lets you choose between a real 4:3 picture with black bands down the left and right or a nasty progessive distortion mode where the edges of the picture are stretched out to fill the screen leaving the central section untouched. For some reason this horrible distortion was the factory default, but it only took a couple of button presses to educate it to understand how sane people watch TV.