I would appreciate if someone could clarify something for me about this. I do understand the basic concept of 'Windowboxing' and I know that it is done primarily to prevent overscan. (I'm not really thrilled at the concept)
I have a Maxent 50" Plasma, which although modest presents an excellent picture quality; I also have a slightly older Momitsu Region Free PAL to NTSC DVD player which has normal 'Zoom' capability.
Now, here is the thing. In all the reading I've done about Windowboxing (and, believe me I am going BLIND, and NOT for enjoyable reasons! : ) I seem to get the idea that the Windowboxing, say done by Criterion for example, renders a fairly small or thin area around the picture (maybe an inch at most) on all 4 sides. Okay, I could live with that, especially with a nice 50" screen. BUT, and it's a VERY BIG BUT like Marah Carrey's, I have a few DVDs, some very nice high quality versions such as the Collector's Edition of 'VERTIGO' and the Criterion version (I THINK) of 'JUDGEMENT AT NUREMBURG' (both with a 16x9 ratio!) that when I go to play them on my Plasma for some weird and mysterious reason the picture is Windowboxed so dang small that I have to use the 'Zoom 1' setting on my DVD Player to fill the screen properly. Now, here's the weird part... we are not talking here about just a 1/2 inch or even a 1 inch black border on all 4 sides; we are talking about around like 6 inches or so... ON ALL 4 SIDES!
In all the reading I've done, ON ONE has mentioned this happening at all. What ON EARTH could be causing the picture to be so EXTREMELY Windowboxed??? Granted, that on the first Zoom setting I have VERY, VERY carefully compared the resolution, or more acurately the picture quality between the Windowboxed and the Zoomed picture and quite honestly there isn't quite enough difference to get horribly upset about, but STILL there is indeed definitely some noticeable but moderate loss of quality.
So, is this normal? I have checked all of the settings of both the DVD Player and the Plasma and all of the aspect ratios and initial screen size & resolutions are correctly set up. And also I am using a HDMI to DVI connector between them. I THINK that the beginning menu fills the screen normally, but when it goes to the film itself it is a considerably smaller image.
If ANYONE has ANY idea at all WHY I am getting such a small Windowboxed image or if it IS indeed the way the DVD is SUPPOSED to look, then PLEASE by all means let me know!
Good idea! I think doing extensive reading (I'm going blind :) I believe that with DVDs that are NOT anamorphic my DVD Player renders them that way, which seems incorrect to me. But, with most other DVDs they seem to be fine. That is the ONLY thing I have come up with so far...
