Setting on the DVD players or televisions are wrong...widescreen should fill the screen. Your 4:3 videos are stretched or zoomed, and yes they fill the screen but they are distorted if they are filling a widescreen TV.

Check your settings on the DVD players. Go to the menu on the DVD player and you can fix it.

Would you buy an SD Camera these days
 

Negative!!!! YOUR settings are all wrong! ...and that's why you needlessly spent money to buy an HD Camcorder just to record it in SD.

You can fix it, though, and set it to where I have it. Then you can play SD and not have to worry about constantly changing your settings. It would have saved you a lot of money, too.

When you pay for my TV, my friends TVs, and everyone elses that I know, you can dictate how they should have their settings, and whether it's "wrong" or not. Until then, don't presume to play God. There is no right or wrong. There is what works best for the person who owns it.

Okay, I'm going to go watch the last football game I taped for our local high school, and just chill. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

I guess I need to find another way of making a living. Videography is clearly not working out, as I cannot grasp that post...went straight over my head.

I've bought 6 HD cameras when I just needed to keep my PD150s. Bummer.

In my area, more and more people who don't have a tiny bit clue about HD/SD/16:9/4:3 stuff we are talking about now have flat panel LCDs to watch what the majority of us in this forum would regard as junk on expensive screens. Though most of those people couldn't care less about the finer point of quality viewing and maybe simply wouldn't know how to set their displays correctly, they still appreciate good things like Blu-ray or HD player box playback on their screens. They ALL want to have that kind of viewing experience and sure will try to get it if only they can afford it. The reasons are economic as much as technical knowledge or even taste. The true barrier is delivery. As time goes by, more broadcast and cable channels turn HD (as they've so far), Blu-ray players get as cheap as regular DVD players were just one or two years ago, Blu-ray titles get cheaper and rental alternative is available, new display sets that can directly play various formats of HD videos recorded on cheap thumb drives come to the market etc., even clueless people will learn what is good and what is junk. They will start to adapt to the changes and when they can afford them, they will get them.

The majority of the pros in my area now own HD equipment. What most of them have done to make a living is still dumb down their materials to suit the market. The degrees of dumbing down vary but the days of clueless people watching 4:3 movies stretched out to fit their new 16:9 LCDs or watching 400,000 or so pixel contents blown up to 2-millon pixel screens and feeling good will soon be over.

Well said, W.

I suspect that if Manny doesn't see that 4:3 people are shown fat and wide then the 16:9 TVs are all in the 'zoom' mode. Of course there's no distortion, but losing 25% of what's already an iffy SD 4:3 image will make it look pretty ropey on a 56 incher I'd imagine.

And of course content is all, nobody here would ever deny that, so I can believe that the audience weren't asking about camcorder settings and aspect ratios. Who would? And they probably asked for a copy of the DVD so that they could see it correctly pillarboxed at home.

Don't fly off in a huff Manny. The considered replies posted here have just been trying to help you set up your TVs correctly, that's all.

tom.

Yes, Tom you are right. It was the older tvs that stretched, the newer ones now seem to zoom to fill up 4:3 images.

Yes, with SD 4:3 the choice is
1.Losing the LCD's display area with the pillar box
2.Further losing the paltry 400,000-pixel count with display zooming to eliminate the pillar box and maybe also losing vital parts of the image like people's heads, faces or feet etc.
3.Stretching the frame to fit the display and living with the always distorted picture, either equally distorted on the entire screen area or less in the middle but more on both sides (some newer displays' feature)

No getting around one of the above but if the viewer somehow likes what she sees, I guess maybe it's good enough.

Years ago I remember talent complaining that 'TVs add 10 lbs to you'. That was in the days of huffing, puffing CRTs, with scan lines all over the place and picture distortions a-plenty.

Jump forward 25 years and we have pixel-perfect, non-distorting, zero overscan digital displays. So what do we do? We stretch, pull, zoom, push and squeeze the image in an effort to 'use all the real-estate I've paid for'.

Sigh.

tom.