In Belgium I saw a clear switch from 4:3 to 16:9 between 2005 and 2006. In 2005 80% of my clients had a "plain" 4:3 screen, in 2006 only 50% with 4:3 and this year 90% of my clients have 16:9.
Acually stores don"t sell 4:3 screens anymore, it's all 16:9 since this year.

Untill now not one client has asked for hd material though, I am still working with sd (Sony vx2100 and a pana dvx100b) and nobodies complaining so far. I must say that these big widescreen lcd's which I see more and more when I visit my clients have a big difference in image quality. Some time ago I saw some of my demo footage on a bigscreen fujitsu and it looked awfull, it looked like images from a vhs tape and yesterday again a lcd bigscreen from jvc and I was surprised how nice it looked, the tv produced sharp images and nice looking colours, only the image was somewhat distorted because the tv seem to have problems getting the right aspect ratio.

Most people here don"t even know what hd is actually, that's why i'm still waiting for an upgrade to hd, normally I was planning to go to hd by the end of this year but I'm not sure about that anymore. I expect a real change by the ending of next year. The prizes of blue ray recorders will continue to drop, people will have playstations 3 with the blue ray player and xboxes whith hd dvd's.

I'm also a bit concerned what the future wil bring, especially with all those different formats, people with blue ray, hd dvd and regular dvd players. Imagine having to sell 100 copies of a recording to 100 different customers, you have to ask in advance what type of recorder they all have.

Noa, your take on the 16:9 switchover in Belgium sounds to be very like here in the UK, and any TV shop will have 95% of sets on sale being 16:9 with only the smallest portables 4:3 now.

What you didn't explain was how you use your DVX and 2100 though. If all your clients are watching on 16:9 displays, surely you're not making them 4:3 program material? If you are, then that's the best way of ensuring it'll be squashed, stretched and distorted every which way.

tom.

Plain old 4x3 here too with no one asking for 16x9. I actually prefer the 16x9 ratio but until I get asked for it....

I wonder if most places here in the US are still using 4x3 or if it is just because I am in a more 'rural' area than most...?

With the sony I just use the letterbox option in the camera and for the dvx the squeeze option as that works best on 16:9 tv's. In premiere pro (1.5) I allways set the project settings to 16:9 pal widescreen and every tv I have seen my footage on has the possibility to change aspect ratio so it's displayed correctly. There is just a rare case were it's not 100% correct like the Jvc bigscreen I saw my footage on, this one stretched the image horizontally on the left and right side of the screen and in the centre it compressed the image horizontally. It actually looked real strange but the customer seem to be used to it because they thought it was normal eventhough I pointed out the "problem".

I do notice a quality drop when I letterbox because you loose some pixels anyway and your image gets stretched, with my older 4:3 recordings the image looked noticably sharper on a big screen.

I've seen a lot of 16:9 TV sets here in the U.S., but almost all of them are showing stretched and squashed 4:3 material. Looks awful!

That's because most people don't even see the difference, I think it is a side effect of us videographers seeing all the details, good and bad. If I visit a customer I immediatly see if the aspect ratio on their tv is wrong, they even stretch, as you pointed out, 4:3 images to 16:9 making everybody look like elephants. I'm allways amazed that if I mention this (Not the elephant part ;)) they are not aware about it. I think if would put my image upside down they also won't notice :D

Same here, and the squished 16:9 on a 4:3 tv is just as bad!

Well i have been shooting weddings for 18 months with a XLH1 with no complaints,
I shoot in HD edit in HD and then Avid 7 converts it into DVD's and i think you loose all the benifits of HD, So i bought a 2nd hand 170 to do weddings and checked some weddings i shot 4 years ago with the same camera and to me they looked great

And for me at this point in time until blue ray disk players are main stream and |HD disks drop in price and the public start asking for it i think i will stick to the 170 its still a fine camera and is still comanding a good price ( £2500+ new) so it must be in demand


Yes if you see HD from camera to a HDTV vi the HDMI cable its stunning but how many couples do or for that matter can not many me thinks, yes it will come but not just yet
Long live the 170

Just did it. Sold my trusty old PD150, and bought a used JVC HD100. So, now, I'm only two or three generations behind the times instead of four or five. I wanted to make my next doc in 24p, and to learn how to use a broadcast-style cam. The HD100 was in the budget, so here I go... jumping blind.

Hope it all works out... and hope I don't miss my old axe too much!