not happy with the toshiba A2

[cheapskete OCer]

I just got the A2 on friday but i already found something i do not like.

Why is it that no matter what type of dvd you watch everyone of them have the black bars on the sides or tops and bottoms.
I hate widescreen, except for when at the 1:85:1 ratio, and this player isnt helping things by putting bars on the sides of full screen movies and at the top and bottom of every movie.

I didnt buy a 55" widescreen tv so i could only see 47" of it whenever i watch a movie.Is there some type of option on the player that changes that, I hope im just missing something. There was nothing about that in the manual.

 

[Hi Ho]

I believe there is an option for 4:3 content in the menu but I cannot remember off the top of my head.

Most movies are filmed in a wider aspect ratio than 16:9 and will still have bars on the top and bottom of a widescreen TV. The only way to get rid of them is to use the zoom function on your TV. You will crop the picture when you do this. The A2 is correctly displaying the content. Any properly setup DVD player would do the same.

 

[zildjian]

It's just presenting the movie how it's on the disc. If you want to zoom and crop off part of the image, you can using your TV's zoom feature, or mess with the player preferences and see if it can also zoom and crop. Movies that already fill your screen have just had the cropping already done, losing part of each frame of the movie essentially. By presenting it the way they do w/ the bars, you can decide if you want to crop it or not yourself, so have at it if you don't like the bars.

 

[Audioholics]

Editor's Note: This really isn't a Toshiba HD-A2 problem.

 

[darien87]

I hear ya dude. I remember when I first got my Mitsubishi TV, I just assumed that since my TV was widescreen that all my widescreen DVD's would fill up the whole screen. Imagine my surprise when I popped in that first DVD. But I just learned to deal with it. I'd rather be able to see the whole image and deal with the black bars than zoom in on the picture.

No big deal.

 

[mouettus]

I hear ya dude. I remember when I first got my Mitsubishi TV, I just assumed that since my TV was widescreen that all my widescreen DVD's would fill up the whole screen. Imagine my surprise when I popped in that first DVD. But I just learned to deal with it. I'd rather be able to see the whole image and deal with the black bars than zoom in on the picture.

No big deal.

Ditto. You don't even notice it after 5 minutes of watching.

As for the A2, it IS a good unit (better than the A3 actually if you don't have HDMI audio on your receiver). But, like you, I HATE waiting 30-45 seconds before the system boots and another 15-30 for the movie to load. You know, those things are computers now; they need a boot time.