Transitions are challenging. Adolescence to adulthood, PowerPC chips to Intel processors, newspapers to whatever is going to replace newspapers — the middle of the change is always a bit painful. Right now I’m a little put out by changes in television delivery. Item number 1: the shift to widescreen content. I still have a 4:3 traditional CRT television. One day I’ll get a widescreen, flat panel, fancy-pants HD TV, but I’m holding the line on that for now. Naturally, widescreen content won’t fully fit on my TV, but that’s fine. What I’d like to happen is basic letter-boxing. Give me black bars at the top and bottom when I’m watching something wide. Instead, lately I’ve noticed content that is simply cut off on the sides. Saturday Night Live is a common example of this. On the other side of the problem, why are wide-screen TVs so bad at displaying standard content? How many stretched out, squat, dumpy, goblin-like people do we need to see on wide screens before someone figures out how to make the TVs of America display content in its original aspect ratio?
Item #2: the digital transition. Even though the federal mandate was pushed back to June, the transition has already happened in my area voluntarily. Now I can’t watch a show without the signal cutting out at some point in the episode. Analog TV fails much more gracefully than digital. Digital fails badly — it’s all or nothing. In the meantime, I don’t see any improvement in picture quality. Bah.
Eventually this will all be sorted out, but it’s plenty annoying right now.
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