^^^

I wouldn't say crap but in adition to the black bars you get gray bars too.

Use your TV's "Zoom" function to fill the screen.

This works on mine but only for non-subtitled movies. Otherwise, the subtitles are cut off on the bottom of the screen. Sometimes the picture quality also suffers when you zoom.

Both valid points.

Dunno about Armageddon Criterion, but The Rock Criterion looks much better than the cheep non-anamorphic one.

Most non-anamorphic dvds picture quality suffers when you view them on a widescreen tv, though not always. The Thing is not anamorphic but it looks very acceptable on a zoom/stretch mode. Most of the time, non-anamorphic transfer also means that not a lot of care were put into producing the dvd and the poor PQ is a reflection of the effort level.

Zooming/stretching doesn't always work. There could be limitations on your TV and DVD player. I have three dvd players hooked up to my Mitsu 65" RPTV. They all have some features that the others don't have. Malata has the most comprehensive zooming and panning features I've seen in a player so far but the PQ is not very good on zooms. Momitsu can upscale to 1080i but it doesn't show subtitle on zoom. Mitsu can only stretch horizontally on 1080i.... anyway, you can imagine all these idiosynchracies. I have a bottle of Aspirin ready, on top of my tv, for those non-anamorphic dvds.