Black Bars

I was a little freaked out when I first fired up my new HD DVD player. My Comcast (it's Comcraptic!) cable shows HD movies fullscreen, at 1080i. My HD DVD player also shows movies in 1080i, not fullscreen though, but with thin black bars above and below the main picture. I checked my setup to make sure that both my TV and DVD player were configured for 16:9 ratio picture, the standard for today's widescreen sets. They were.

So why the black bars?

Well, I did a bit of research on the Internet and discovered that most theatrical movies are filmed at a 2.3-2.4:1 ratio. That doesn't match the 16:9 ratio of today's widescreen HD TVs, so the bars are needed to depict the actual movie. Without it, the left and the right sides would be cut out of view. When Comcast (it's Comcraptic!) broadcasts theatrical movies in HD fullscreen, they essentially crop the movie to fit the screen so. That's not the end of the world or anything, but good to know when you shuffle between HD cable and HD DVD.

I popped in a regular DVD in a regular DVD player as an experiment to see if I could discern a difference between it and HD DVD. The difference?

Huge.

First off, I estimate the top and bottom black bars on a regular widescreen DVD are more than twice as wide as the HD DVD bars. And the picture resolution is dramatically worse. The difference between regular DVD and HD DVD is at least as great as that between VHS and DVD. Likely greater, when you throw in 1080p and Dobly TrueHD 5.1 support.

And upscaling works spectacularly well. I popped in a regular DVD version of Live Free or Die Hard (great movie, by the way, my favorite of the series) into the HD DVD player, and as promised, it looks almost as good as actual HD formatted DVD. This is a relief, as I have no intention of replacing my current DVD collection. I've also noticed the Blu-ray DVD library seems larger than the HD DVD one, so I'll likely need to rent regular DVDs for those titles that are exclusive to Blu-ray.