Respect going out to people who can't use their widescreen TV properly

because Hal likes a laugh at the expense of people who are techno-illiterate...

Not being able to face a post on the Labour deputy leadership campaign due to its extreme dullness (oh, for the excitement of the 1981 campaign! Why can't Hilary Benn be more like Tony?) I had a choice between writing about recent gardening work I've been undertaking or a post that caught my eye on IDWID. This is the blog that the guy who does the Jammer's Reviews TV sci-fi reviews site does in his spare time (or maybe he does Jammer's Reviews in his spare time. But anyway they are complementary.) The post was about people who get the aspect ratio wrong on their widescreen TVs and display 'full screen' (4:3 aspect ratio) programmes using the full 16:9 ratio screen, which means everybody looks very fat. Anyway the post is a hilarious and cutting exposé of the widening gap between the capabilities of modern TV equipment and the audience's capacity to use them.

It's not all the audience's fault, however. Manufacturers and broadcasters have to shoulder some of the blame for the fact that there are a load of people watching 4:3 programmes in widescreen. One of the pins on a SCART cable (the standard audio-visual connector in Europe until high-definition came along) is designed to carry a signal which 'switches' the TV between 4:3 mode and 16:9 mode. This works OK provided that:

1. the TV manufacturer has wired the SCART input to recognise the signal;
2. the DVD/set-top box manufacturer has wired the SCART output to produce the signal;
3. [for TV broadcasts] provided the broadcaster includes the signal to switch the aspect ratio as part of the programme broadcast data.

This is the set of conditions that needs to hold for the consumer to be able to enjoy the right aspect ratio on all TV programmes even if he/she is completely clueless. In practice, there's no consistency as to which manufacturers/broadcasters observe these standards. And so we're left with a situation where a lot of people are watching distorted fullscreen pictures on a widescreen telly.

I hate SCART anyway. The idea of a single, two way A/V connector seems good in principle but the manufacturers often don't implement it properly, a good quality SCART cable costs about fifty quid, and they fall out all the time. Part of the reason we had to get a new TV was that the SCART connectors stopped working on our previous one which was only 6 years old. OK, so it was an el cheapo 4:3 CRT set but so what? You shouldn't have to change your TV because the bloody input socket has stopped working! It's like Neil Young said - a "piece of crap." Anyway, that's all for now on the subject of people who can't use their TV, which I have pretty much exhausted - for now. Next stop'll probably be a gardening post from Barney Ruddle, 2007's answer to The Lawnmower Man.