Kill them, just kill them now.

If they just simply didn't like the black bars and chose the distortion over the black bars that would be one thing. But different priorities or not, I would say if they lack the ability to perceive a distorted image as being distorted and still can't tell the difference after being shown the correct image that's in the wiring of the brain.

I don't blame him!

My wife is like that, seriously her and her mother are geniuses and BOTH love the stupidest movies ever made IMHO that is. Comedies that I can't possibly get through she thinks are funny as hell. Makes watching movies a chore sometimes...

I think we're all capable of brain-farting. I went to the house of a good friend of mine, who works in TV production (so he has a hands-on understanding of HDTV), to see his new TV.

1) He bought it at Best Buy. (Okay, not exactly criminal in and of itself)
2) Rather than researching his purchase, he bought the set that had the best looking picture on the floor.
3) He still has not adjusted the set from the out-of-the-box settings.

Now, the set did look great and was set to display proper aspect ratios, but I couldn't imagine not doing a shit-ton of research before buying and not throwing in Blu-ray Essentials (or the like) as one of the first discs played on the set.

Maybe, once you're money-in-hand, sometimes some of the thought process can be jettisoned?

I fail to see the major issue here...you admit the TV looks great as is and set to proper aspect ratios? So then the only issue you have is he didn't research it first but he ended up with a good TV so who cares? And he hasn't adjusted it yet? But it still looks great? I fail to see the real problem here.

What I don't get are the TV Channels that do that exact thing. IFC-HD is really bad for it (and should know better, they aren't TBS). Not only do they not show their programming in HD, they stretch the SD to fill the left and right sides of the screen. If the program is letterboxed, they stretch it but don't bother to stretch it vertically to fix the geometry. It's unwatchable.

The bottom one only looks bad when being compared to the top one in my point of view. Had I not seen the top one, I doubt that I would think that it looked bad.

I have tried to fix my Blu-Ray player doing this and it keeps getting messed up. I asked for help in the proper section and didnt get very many helpful replies. I have to stretch the image or my blu-ray's have bars on all 4 sides. It's a pain in the @$$

- I am assuming you have a 16x9 display
- I am assuming you are watching widescreen content

Go into the set-up menu of your Blu-ray player, and select "16x9" for display type. It sounds like you have it set for a 4x3 TV.

if they hooked up their blu ray player with yellow red and white cables, then it prob wouldn't look too much better then dvd

yep 52' Sanyo 1080p HDTV
The one I checked it with was The Day the Earth Stood Still (remake)

^ OK.....so did you try the set-up menu on the Blu-ray player to see what display type was selected?

Yep I have it on 16x9 widescreen

And it's still showing in window-box?

I would then try your TV and make sure the picture setting is correct. Sounds like it was set to "Full Screen". make sure it's set for widescreen. Should be a button on the remote where you can cycle through and find the right image.

The settings on one's TV are also crucial, and I suspect this may be more of an issue with older HD TVs.

I had five year old 62" Mitsubishi DLP, and using the TV remote's "screen size" button, it had several ways to stretch an image to fill the screen from a DVD player connected via component connections. It would zoom in on the whole image until it filled the screen vertically, it would stretch the entire image, and it had two or three different ways to stretch just certain parts of the image.

However, with my Pani blu layer connected via HDMI it was a different matter. Playing DVDs, there was only one option and it wouldn't fill the screen. The image wouldn't actually stretch... the width of an image would stay the same, it would just compress vertically.

Particular DVDs also contributed to the issue - my non-anamorphic titles would not stretch properly. It was watch them with black bars all around or stretched out horizontally.

And one more thing I just remembered. My TV was only 1080i.

And yet, for some reason, they just can't help but notice black bars.

???

Well, as a graphic designer, maybe it's just my "artist's eye," but to me the bottom image looks wrong. I'll grant it's one thing when it's just a still image, but when watching a moving image the distortion becomes much more pronounced. As a character moves or an image tilts, distortions ripple and appear like ballooning body parts in horror movies.