Whenever I watch DVDs in widescreen I get this dark line about 1/4-1/2" wide at the very top of the picture. It's hard to explain, it's like an absence of color on that one thin line. For example it's most noticable in Superman when the planet is destroyed in the beginning the screen fills up with a red tint; except that one little line across the top of the picture (in between the picture and the top black bar).

Only happens in widescreen modes. More visible in 2.35 than in 1.85 aspect ratio.

Am I making sense?

TV is a 7 year old Toshiba 27" model CF27C40, DVD player is a brand new Zenith DVD2201.

I've heard that maybe my TV is too old and doesn't work great in widescreen "mode"? I've also heard something about Macrovision protection making this line stand out?

Can anyone shed any light on this? Ever heard anything like this before? Thanks.

-John

Have you correctly calibrated the brightness and contrast settings of your TV using Video Essentials or Avia? You probably wouldn't notice it on a correctly calibrated TV.

It could be the difference between mattes on anamorphic discs. Watching anamorphic discs on a non-widescreen TV, the DVD player will generate it's own set of black bars to fill up the screen. What you may be seeing is that your player-generated bars are lighter in color than the bars encoded on the disc.

That would also explain why it is more noticeable in 2.35, since that would have a wider black bar than a 1.85 film, which would have a very small one.

Dropping the brightness and contrast to reference levels would minimize or eliminate any noticeable difference between the two colors of black.

not treu, when you watch a anamorfic movie in "letterbox" every other scan line is deleted( for example 400 lines anamorfic resolution results in aprox 200 line resolution in letterbox) in the logical result of this are the black bars

Wow is this post wrong.

First of all, it's "anamorphic."

And second, every other line is not deleted. Anamorphic enhancement increases resolution by a third, it doesn't double it, so one out of every four lines has to be eliminated somehow. How that downconversion happens is dependent on what brand of player you have. Some eliminate one out of every four lines, others combine lines. There are other methods as well.

The number of lines you list is incorrect, too. There are 480 visible lines of horizontal resolution on an NTSC set. How many of those lines are used to store actual picture information depends on what the original aspect ratio of the movie is.