1.85 material on 16:9 display

What PJ are you using? And what movie?

Quote:
Sony HS20


Movies: Me, Myself and Irene, Babeig in the City, Beauty and the Beast (to name a couple of the 1.85 anamorphic movies I tried).

It's likely that your projector ever so slightly overscans. The black bars on 1.85 material are rather negligable on a 1.78 display. Try using a HTPC to get 1:1 mapping. You should see slight bars then.

Quote:
Please excuse the ignorance (I'm a noob), but what is overscan?

I remember seeing a great link about overscan that explained how it all came to be.


Basically what happened was when they made the standard for making TV's they stated that the image MUST fill the screen, so alot of manufacturers would make the tubes slightly larger than the frame it was going to be put in so they could avoid this (i.e. Some of the picture is actually behind the frame).


DVE and AVIA have tests for overscan.


If I find that link I'll post it here.

5% overscan is normal for a television and is nothing to be concerned with. This is usually enough to make the black bars on 1.85:1 movies disappear on a 16:9 screen. A projector doesn't have the physical need for overscan like tube TVs do, but some manufacturers build it in anyway for consistency. Also, if you try watching broadcast television on a display calibrated for zero overscan you'll see all sorts of distracting signal crap along the edges of the picture that you're not meant to see.


As Vlad points out, most video calibration discs (like Avia, or Digital Video Essentials) have test patterns for determining how much overscan your display has. Like I said, anything 5% or less is nothing to be concerned about.

All projectors should come with zero overscan, and give you the option of using it if you so desire. Anything less is ridiculous to me. It would be so easy to do, yet I know of no manufacturer who has accomplished it.

Quote:
My NEC LT240K projector has a "zero overscan" option.

Quote:
Indeed, but does it really have zero overscan? Have you tested it with an overscan pattern?

I still get black bars when I watch a 185:1 movie, but I noticed that I do have overscan, when I watched The Lion King (166:1) and there were no bars on the side.