Christmas Story Marathon on TBS

[Turtleboy]

While I love this movie, WTF did TBS-HD do to the picture?

More stretching? It looks terrible.

[windracer]

Maybe your vision has deteriorated due to soap poisoning.

:D

[Bob_Newhart]

That's funny. I have this marathon on right now. It's ruined (i.e., stretchified), but still a great movie. RIP Darren McGavin :(

"It's a major award!!!"

[madscientist]

I watched it earlier tonight while waiting (and waiting and ...) for my kids to fall asleep.

It looked fine to me: no stretching that I could detect, on my TBSHD channel (RCN). Maybe I'm too tired and full of nog (+ "extras") to see it.

[mtnagel]

I just might almost prefer a stretched HD signal on my 46" HDTV to an SD signal on my parents 27" tv. Actually, probably not.

[Mabes]

TBS is the worst excuse for an HD channel I've seen. Other than the baseball playoffs, I don't think I've seen a single show in HD. And it terrifies me that the future is more of the same. As more and more Joe Sixpacks get HD, all they're going to care about is that the whole screen be filled no matter how stretched it makes the picture.

OTOH, a lot more people today want letterboxed DVDs than a few years ago, so maybe hope is not lost.

[aindik]

TBS is the worst excuse for an HD channel I've seen. Other than the baseball playoffs, I don't think I've seen a single show in HD.

Yeah, they're pretty terrible. They even have new original content that's not in HD (FrankTV isn't, and I'm not sure about their other shows). They show movies in stretchyvision that TNT-HD has previously shown in actual HD.

What's worse, they get away with marking everything in their lineup as "HD," so that I can't look at guide data on my TiVo and determine what's in HD and what isn't. My TiVo records suggestions all day and night from TBS-HD (old sitcoms, mostly) that are marked as HD but aren't HD. Who wants to watch stretched out episodes of Seinfeld?

And what they do to The Office is spectacularly bad. They take the SD signal with the letterboxed picture and stretch that out. So, not only do you have stretched out crap, but it doesn't even fill the screen. If they don't have access to The Office in HD (and, why don't they?), at least zoom in on it instead of stretching it. It's already in 16:9.

I'm pretty close to removing it from Channels I Receive, at least until the baseball season starts. I'd rather watch the shows unstretched from the SD version of TBS.