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Re: HDTV suggestions
Yeah, the wide screen TVs generally let you select the way you want to view--either "normal" (with bands at the sides when viewing 4:3 material), "full" which is how widescreen video should be, or "zoom" also called "fill" which crops the top and bottom of a 4:3 show to fit the full width of the wide screen, or "wide zoom" or "wide fill" which stretches out the edges of the 4:3 show to fill out the whole width of the screen.
I generally watch 4:3 stuff in the zoom mode.
Also, we have a couple digital TV tuners that do SDTV, not HDTV, and they also have a zoom feature, so you can select how the display looks. Typical choices are "set by program", "letterbox", "cropped", "sqeezed". I usually set it to cropped, so the sides of the widescreen content is cut off on a 4:3 TV.
What's fun is connecting the SDTV tuner to a widescreen TV, watching content that was originally HDTV (widescreen) and figuring out how to get all the zooms set so that it shows up like it should. Works well once you get it figured out...for example, I watched the Carrier show on PBS on the widescreen in full digital clarity, although it is pretty low resolution because the only PBS transmissions we get are from an SD repeater instead of the HD transmitter (the problem with living 75 miles from a big city)
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