So I have come to find that it is to no fault of my Samsung HPT5054 nor my Toshiba HD-A2 that when viewing hd-dvds, because the way that most of the movies are formated, the letterboxing is unavoidable? I have done a bit of research, and I have come to find that alot of movies are not filmed in a true 16:9???, so it appears that burn-in is in my forecast when watching movies. FYI, the zoom feature cannot be enabled through the tv via hdmi, and there is no zoom feature on the player. I am pretty bummed because in being cautious to avoid burn-in, it seems I have come to find that in this case, it is out of my hands. I bought this tv to enjoy hd-dvds!!! Even if there was a zoom feature on the player, would'nt that potentially compromise the picture? Im rather new at this, so forgive me if I am missing something, but as of now, I am considering switching it up with an LCD so I dont have to worry about this sort of thing...its rather ridiculous, please help

yea, you are right, you are being rather ridiculous... :rolleyes:

I watch movies that are wider then 16:9, most of them are 2.35:1 on my panasonic plasma all the time. you may get image retention especially if the tv is rather new, but it goes away after some normal tv watching, and as the tv gets older the image retention gets less severe. I have had my tv for a year now and after watching a full movie I have to look for where the black bars were and even then its gon in about a minute of watching normal tv. Actual burn in would take some serious abuse.

Out of the box the contrast/brightness of these displays are usually turned way up (so they look good in stores). Use Avia or DVE to set your contrast and brightness properly and then forget about it. As long as you occasionally watch some video that fills the screen you will be OK. If you never watch video that fills the screen, then why worry?

You will always lose something changing aspect ratios, either part of the screen or proportions. Your display may have several modes, e.g. dot to dot, zoom, wide, full, auto. You should be able to scale the video to the screen size when operating in some of these modes.