jchamoun

This might be a stupid question, but I really need to know...

I just recently bought a 26-inch 16:9 Toshiba TV, and a new upconverting Philips DVD player, which is connected to the TV via an HDMI cable.

I already knew that 2:35:1 movies will still have black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, so that's not the issue, but are the black bars supposed to be of uneven size? When watching movies with that aspect ratio, the top black bar is slightly shorter than the bottom bar.

Also, with 1:85:1 movies, which I was led to believe would fill up the entire screen, there is still a thin black strip at the bottom of the screen, but not at the top. Is this normal?

I realize that there might be nothing wrong with the display and that I'm just nitpicking, but I would really appreciate it if someone could set my mind at ease about this.

Spiky

Sounds like the picture is shifted up a bit. Might be something you can adjust. You would likely be able to if that was an LCD computer monitor, can you with that TV?

Could also be an HDMI sync issue. Could try resetting the connection.

eedoon

I have no idea about the black bar on the 2.35:1 movie, but I think the thin black bar on 1.85:1 movie is normal.

mzupeman2

Well I know that some upconverting players have to zoom the pic out a little bit to keep the best possible picture. For 1.85:1 you might see a black bar across the bottom, so yeah, if that's still happening, you'll probably see a little more black space on the bottom part of the screen with 2.35:!. That's my best educated guess.

rw2516

My tv or dvd player, can't remember which, has a setting to adjust the black bars. You can put all the black at the top if you want or all at the bottom. Look to see if you have some kind of adjustment like that.

mrhan

Sometimes it's the disc. A friend brought over his copy of Grand Prix not knowing I already had it. I put it in the player (Oppo971) and there was only a black bar on the bottom on my 16X9. I said it looked odd and put in my copy. It was centered with equal sized black bars. I repeated the process and the results were the same.

drmoze

16:9 is 1.78:1, which is less than 1.85:1. A picture that is 1.85:1, to fit on the same width screen, will have a height that is only 0.96 of the screen height (1.78/1.85). So there should be a thin black bar that is 4% of the screen height.

chipmac

It sounds to me like your overscan or vertical height adjustment could be off like Spiky touched on. Get a calibration disc like Avia and check to see if the overscan is equal on all four sides. If it is then it could simply be the way the disc you're seeing this on was mastered. Some discs do not master with the image centered top to bottom.

Spiky

Yes, the OP's point (as I read) is that the bars are uneven, not whether they should exist.