Getting Rid of Side Bars

[LTJ]

I have an Onkyo TX-SR606 AVR with 1080i Upscaling powered by Faroudja DCDi Edge, a Sony Bravia LCD, and a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD DVR cable box. My cable carrier is WOW. My intent was to have SD upscaled to 1080i, 16:9. However, those annoying side bars still appear on all SD channels (staying at 4:3). In setup for the cable box, I can choose the shade of the side bars, but I have no option to turn off the bars. Now I'm concerned that I need to return the Onkyo--maybe upscaling will not work as long as I have WOW cable service since their cable box is ultimately controlling this situation. Can anyone help me on this?

 

[allargon]

I have an Onkyo TX-SR606 AVR with 1080i Upscaling powered by Faroudja DCDi Edge, a Sony Bravia LCD, and a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD DVR cable box. My cable carrier is WOW. My intent was to have SD upscaled to 1080i, 16:9. However, those annoying side bars still appear on all SD channels (staying at 4:3). In setup for the cable box, I can choose the shade of the side bars, but I have no option to turn off the bars. Now I'm concerned that I need to return the Onkyo--maybe upscaling will not work as long as I have WOW cable service since their cable box is ultimately controlling this situation. Can anyone help me on this?

Not to be rude, but you need to learn how to live with the side bars. There's nothing wrong with them. 4:3 is supposed to have side bars on a 16:9 set even upscaled. My Philips 3475/37 DVD recorder and my LG BH200 Blu-Ray player stretch 4:3 content. It drives me nuts. Your Onkyo is actually correctly upscaling 4:3 content. Your cable remote probably has a setting to stretch or zoom 4:3 content. You should leave it as is.

 

[Phil Taylor]

There's nothing wrong with your Onkyo receiver. Like allargon said - upscaling is not meant to get rid of the side bars but rather to make SD look better on HD sets. The upscaling should make SD look a bit better if/when you zoom it to fit your screen. SD content simply was never really intended for the new home theater displays.

 

[Adam]

Welcome to the forum!

Your Sony TV might have options for stretching out the 4:3 image to make it fill the entire screen. If you are unsure about that, just let us know the model number and we can check it out for you.

 

[Alex2507]

My money says that your HD box is going to have a more options setting in the menu where you can get to audio/video settings and choose something like 4:3 Stretch. That's been covered and I agree that that option sucks. However my girl really digs seeing Oprah looking even wider than she already is. Who am I to argue? I'm just glad Rosie O'Donnel isn't on.

Let us know when you get it under hand.

 

[zhimbo]

but I have no option to turn off the bars.

Let's remember one thing - it's not turning off the bars, it's turning on some sort of stretch or distortion. Squarish image, long rectangular screen, there's just going to be unused space.

Your TV undoubtedly has several such options in the menu system, but all will necessarily distort the image (the menu parameter you set might be called "Wide", based on a quick google search re:Sony LCD tvs, but I could be wrong). I always find these distortions to be far more objectionable than the black bars myself.

 

[bandphan]

Survey says: Black Bars As mentioned your program sould be veiwed in its orignal format, and scaled to match your panels resolution or presented to your panel native.

 

[hjfischer]

I noticed that the latest issue of Home Theater magazine has an article about a device which masks the side bars. Seems like either zooming your way out of the bars or living with them are the only reasonable options.

 

[MDS]

This is rather simple. Some people will say you should always view a program in its original aspect ratio and others absolutely hate the side bars.

If you want to get rid of the side bars, use the zoom/wide feature of the TV. However, the cable box settings may complicate matters. If the cable box has a setting whereby you can tell it the aspect ratio of the TV (16:9) it may automatically change the image to 16:9 and thus it will be adding the black bars and the TV cannot undo that. If you can, set the cable box to send the image through as-is and let the TV deal with scaling and conversion from 4:3 to 16:9.

My Toshiba LCD automatically detects the aspect ratio and resolution and will choose 'natural' for 4:3 images. It is a little wider than a normal 4:3 image with side bars but the side bars still remain. I'm not particularly bothered by the side bars but still change it to 'Theater Wide 1' which stretches the image to fill the screen.

 

[no1maestro]

"wide" screen

I empathize with the bar folks but the other answer is even worse. I have the big Sony Wega and you can set several different "zoom" settings but they all introduce distortion; some more and some less but distortion just the same.
Things might change in the future but until then filling the screen is not a viable answer for those of us who don't want our audio or video distorted. I just can't believe we would put menu choices to introduce distortion to the sound to meet some "standard". In time, more of the larger, wider aspect ratio material will fill our screens!!

 

[Alex2507]

If you want to get rid of the side bars, use the zoom/wide feature of the TV.

The ZOOM feature on my TV does indeed fill the screen from end to end but it also cuts off part of the top and bottom. That really bugs me for some strange reason.

A STB setting of 1080i Wide/4:3 Stretch Pic does exactly what the OP seems to want with my TV/STB. Why anybody would do that is beyond me though. Embrace the bars!

 

[itschris]

On the 8300, you can set the bars to dark (black). You'll get used to that after awhile. It'll just look like part of the TV after you get used to it. On stuff that I don't care about, which is almost any regular tv show or news, I just use one of the stretch options. It really doesn't bother me anymore either way.