Philips brings new meaning to Widescreen TV

What on earth is the guy going on about - we have to scale TV because 16:9 TV are not as tall are 4:3...

That is by far the stupidest thing ive ever heard anyone said.

4:3 and 16:9 TV"s are the same HEIGHT, the latter is just wider! We dont look at things like square, we 4, 5 sometimes 6x as much left to right as we do up and down (depending how much attention you pay to your peripheral vision...and for most idiots thats not much as they miss thats directly infront of them)

Im watching movies now on my 16:9 TV from about 3 meters away, its 40" and I can safely say its far too small to show films made in 2.39:1 - the black borders top and bottom mean 1/3rd of the screen is not being use, giving me about the eqiv of a 30" tv!

I don't want enough films to justify having a TV made to the right ratio, but if I had a cinema room and not enough space for a decent 2.39:1 projector id go for one of these for certain, although its questionable if the content would scale properly as it would have to hack off some of the borders on blu ray...unless of course they are not encoded into the movie anyway, in which case it would do its job perfectly.

Regardless no TV is too wide - if we're to be properly emerged we'd need this ratio TV at about 10x the size it is here...

I see the above comment about pub owners stretching a 4x3 image to fit the 21x9 screen. It is entirely more likely that pub owners will simply put on two or three different 4x3 sports games simultaneously (side by side by side).

I don't get why they just didn't use the golden ratio from day one and stick with it (1.6181:1). Any maths boffin would tell you that it's inarguably the best ratio for all viewing purposes. The ratio doesn't exist on any production TV, but 16:9 is closest (but is still too wide).

I'm not really sure I understand the point? Anyone buying this either has a nitch use, or simply "doesn't get it". Some Blue-Ray movies such as "Dark Knight" actually have 16x9 content mixed in on a few of the screens.

This "Ultra Wide" screen would simply crop it out. Also; I assume these TV's are of lower resolution 1920x1080 being 16x9 full HD, these are likely 1920x823.

Newer display tech such as 8G Plasma, OLED, and the still-born SED offer contrast so deep that the borders disappear anyway making this aspect only useful for inferior display technology such as LCD.

Sorry but I don't get the point of making a special 21:9 aspect TV for 2.39:1 content.

Shouldn't it be a 2.39:1 TV? Why go through all the effort and still have scaling - no matter how small.

Then again it's a Philips so it would never be on my shopping list regardless.

Oh dear.

Now I guess we can expect to see 4:3 aspect ratio programs stretched to 21:9 by pub owners who do not know how to setup their new TV... Lots of places I have visited seem to have notion that you are not utilising your TV properly if you don't use every square inch of the expensive new screen.

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Only a PC can truly take advantage of this. with DVD you could output your DVD's to 16x9 but not with Blu-Ray or any current HD media. I would assume the TV would have to chop off the black bars and each movie has different resolutions, 2.35:1, 2.42:1, 1.79:1, how will this TV handle all those resolutions.

And why would I want to stretch a 16:9 formatted movie or show?

2.35:1, though it can range. Originally called Cinemascope.

whilst your putting your advanced orders in best put an order in for a wind farm or an industrial diesel generator for the back garden at the same time lol :O)

Weather forecasts in the UK already have them scrolling the country because of the 16:9 problem. They can't show the country in one go, like they used to just fine, because the new wide screen tv's are shorter. It's also partly to do with the new dumb way they show the weather on BBC.

If 21:9 became the standard for general TV then things would only get worse. 4:3 is actually a very useful size for a general TV, sometimes you need height, sometimes width. How are they going to show someone tall, something tall, a full person frame if the height of an average tv is only 15 inches? This widescreen thing is such a gimmick, I can't believe people are still falling for it.

32 inch 4:3 was a large telly, now you need at least 42inch widescreen to have the same physical height. I'd rather have a 42 inch 4:3 than a 42 inch 16:9.

This is great. Think about playing games on this :). I want one too. I think they will be pretty high priced to strat off with but I think once other companies start releasing things similar they will come down quite a bit. I an predicting around the 3k - 5k mark

Oh my lord, I've been waiting for them to make something like this! I want one so bad... I wonder how damned expensive this will be?