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 March 1, 2005 Video Posers A number of questions on various video topics have ended up in my inbox. Here are a few, in no particular order.VHS on an HDTV One correspondent wonders if the high resolution of an HDTV set might make the viewing experience of an analog VHS tape worse than watching it on a regular analog TV. If you switch back and forth between a VHS picture and a digital signal, you’ll certainly notice a much greater contrast in quality, but that doesn’t mean that the VHS image will look worse than on an NTSC set. It might be better if the HDTV unit has picture-enhancement features such as upconversion to progressive scan, as most do. Much will also depend on how good the VHS machine is. If it produces an inferior picture, the results will look lousy on any set. Fortunately, the best VCRs today are capable of surprisingly high-quality pictures, given the format’s inherent limitations. Rebuilt projectors A few companies are "rebuilding" CRT-based video projectors and selling them for about a third of their factory-new price, says a reader in Oregon. The thought of buying anything rebuilt or reconditioned that’s that expensive is rather scary, until you realize that it’s about the only way for most home-theater owners to afford a truly top-of-the-line projector. I asked the people at one projector maker about this, and they felt that about the only rebuilding necessary would be replacing the CRTs. Once that’s done, you basically have a new projector. I say go for it. DVD to TV antenna One letter-writer recently received a DVD player as a gift but couldn’t hook it up to her TV set directly because the set has only an antenna input, and routing the signal through her VCR’s RCA inputs scrambled the video. Her equipment, unfortunately, is behaving normally. The copy-protection scheme used in DVD is designed to befuddle a VCR’s input circuits. Many video recorders react the same way, whether you intend to record the signal or just pass it through to your TV set. There’s really no way around it. I suspect, however, that a set with no line inputs is fairly old and wouldn’t do justice to DVD quality anyway. Auto pan and scan? Many readers hate the black bars that appear when a widescreen image is shown on a 4:3 set. One asks if there is a device that converts an image from a widescreen ratio to 4:3. It’s true that widescreen images can tend to get lost on conventional TV screens, especially if the movie was shot with one of the more extreme aspect ratios: some Panavision movies leave half the screen blank. I’m not aware of such a conversion device, but I’m not sure it would be very satisfactory if it existed. Creating a 4:3 pan-and-scan version of a widescreen movie is an exacting process -- it’s not a simple matter of showing only the middle portion of the image. Any automated simulation of this process would inevitably leave important material out of the frame. Pan-and-scan versions do exist of most films, sometimes on the same DVD, and they’re worth searching out. Purists may argue, but lots of film fans prefer the 4:3 versions. ...Ian G. Masters
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