I came across something odd this weekend. I watched a Mei Ah vcd of a mainland film called Gold Marriage. (A pretty good film about a senior couple approaching their 50th wedding anniversary.)

I watched it on my R1 Pioneer deck. Later I popped it into my Sampo to check on some credits because I had another movie in the Pioneer. That's when I noticed that the aspect ratio was drastically different. In the Sampo, the ratio is around 2:1, in the Pioneer it is around 1.76 ! Both players are hooked up to the same TV. There was a 2 inch vertical difference in picture height between the two machines.

I've never done a side by side comparison before, but I certainly wouldn't have expected this. Can anyone explain why this would happen?

I guess I'll try some other vcds now and see if the same thing occurs.

There are PAL encoded VCDs with a higher vertical resolution.

352 x 288 pixels @ 25 frames/second

NTSC VCD is 352 x 240 pixels @ 29.97 frames/second

That's a best guess on my part to why.

yeah, that's probably. it cuz 48 extra lines is about 16% of the total picture and 2.1 to 1.76 aspect ration difference is about 16% as well.

So, one of those machines (most likely the Sampo) is knocking off the extra lines to get back to approximate OAR

I've never been clear on the PAL/NTSC details, so bear with me.

So, would that mean that the Sampo would be the "truer" ratio at 2:1? Even though it's dropping the extra lines?

And would the Pioneer be outputting more lines since it's not
doing a PAL/NTSC conversion? If so, should it produce the more detailed picture?

I know Sampo etc.. convert PAL -> NTSC by just dropping lines to get it to OAR.

However, with anamorphic discs, it just stretches the pictures (but that's DVDs and we are talking VCDs)

So the Sampo is as close as it can get to OAR.

I am not positive, but the movie might be playing 4% faster than it was filmed on both your systems.