Re: Hi-Def not always full-screen ?

On Sat, 03 May 2008 23:01:39 +0000 Ed <FakeAddress@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

| Let's say I am watching a football game in hi-def, on my 32' LCD TV.  I
| don't really know if it's 720 or 1080 - the point is, the image fills
| every pixel of the screen at 16:9, and it looks fantastic.  Literally,
| you can see every blade of grass.  I am in video heaven.
| 
| Then, I switch over to PBS and watch, oh, Nature or Masterpiece or
| something like that.  I know PBS is broadcasting in hi-def but the
| image is often letter-boxed 16:9, with several inches of black space
| all around.  Sure, I can expand it in some fa****on using the TV aspect
| controls but then it either is distorted or else has a certain
| fuzziness that detracts from the quality.
| 
| It's not like this all the time - I think some PBS programs really are
| full-screen hi-def, like I would have expected.  But it seems like the
| ones I really want to see are smaller than the available space.
| 
| What is going on here?  Why isn't PBS hi-def like football-game hi-def?
| I read about some PBS stations doing some sort of bandwidth-saving
| compromise on their hi-def broadcasts - is this what I am seeing?

Digital TV does not imply it must be high definition.  While digital is a
requirement for high definition, there are other things that can be done
with digital.  Many stations have chosen to transmit multiple programming
streams instead.  A lot of PBS stations have chosen to do so.  Maybe they
feel it is of more value to the community to offer a greater choice of
programming than to make one program look better and have less of a
choice.

Let us know which PBS station it is, and how you receive it (antenna,
cable,
satellite).  You could also call them to ask what kind of transmissions
they
are doing (if they transfer the call to engineering, you might be in
luck).

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