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Zooming 4:3 letterboxed material with AE100  

post #1 of 7
5/13/02 at 8:08am
Thread Starter 
I'm considering the AE100 but I can't get a clear answer on one issue which I'm certain has been addressed in this forum but can't find it.

I watch a lot of movies on TCM (recorded on my TiVo), many of which are letterboxed. I know the AE100 is a 16:9 projector and with 4:3 material, you have black bars on the sides. This is fine, but what happens with 4:3 letterboxed material? You'd have black bars on the sides as well as top/bottom, right? Is there any way to "zoom" the image so that it fills the 16:9 screen, chopping off the top and bottom of the image?

Thanks,

-Mike...
post #2 of 7
5/13/02 at 8:32am
You can zoom 4:3 material to fill a 16:9 screen. I've done it. I have a VCR, connected it's composite out to s-video to a VB50 to the AE100 via RGB. I prefer the orginal 4:3 picture, it's seems a little clearer and doesn't have the "stretched" look. Note: this was on real 4:3 stuff, not letterboxed 4:3.
post #3 of 7
5/13/02 at 8:45am
I just played with this a bit last night and got mixed results.

On some music videos that I have on s-vhs that are letterboxed, "zooming" in on the AE 100 looked pretty good. but on my laserdisc to s-vhs copy of Schindler's List, it still seemed stretched and squished vertically.

My setup is S-VHS --> VB50 (via S-Video)
VB50 --> AE100 (via VGA)

For these tests, the AE 100 was set to PC priority NORMAL (NOT WIDE)
VB50 was set to 852 X 480 res.
post #4 of 7
5/13/02 at 10:53am
The digital zoom makes it look kinda bad. What I'm doing is mounting the projector as far back as I can. That way I normaly use the projector at no zoom. When I watch letterbox stuff on 4x3 I max the zoom to get a bigger picture, and the rest of the unwanted picture goes onto the wall. Since my wall is dark, it's not much of a problem for me.
post #5 of 7
5/13/02 at 11:12am
Thread Starter 
Doing the manual zoom sounds OK, I wonder if using an HTPC I could rescale/crop or just zoom the the 4:3 letterboxed stuff. I would think anyone with a 16:9 TV/RPTV/PJ would have to deal with this issue...

-Mike...
post #6 of 7
5/13/02 at 2:22pm
I tried the Zoom mode on letterboxed shows like Enterprise and ER.

In both cases the picture looked too bad to watch (IMO)

I opted for 4:3.
post #7 of 7
5/14/02 at 7:33am
so, how would it look zooming a high quality image like a 4x3 lbxed DVD or laserdisc? Obvisouly zooming will make imperfections in the source more visible but are you all saying that the zooming feature itself is of poor quality?

That's not good if the 100 can't zoom well. The sony 10 HT zooms with almost *no* visible artifacts except that the image is bigger.

-dave
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