Usability – designing for people

At last, the 16:9 aspect ratio for TV sets is a well established standard in the UK. It is a much more pleasing format, aesthetically better and closer to the wide field of vision which humans actually see the world in. It’s all good…

Unfortunately, there is still a down side to widescreen caused by a sorry lack of technical standards, perpetuated by that shoddy video device connector, SCART.

So what is the problem? Picture distortion. It really irks me to see a 4:3 aspect ratio picture stretched to fit a 16:9 widescreen TV set. In most cases this is down to bad setup. Most people don’t know about aspect ratios or obscure equipment settings, nor should they need to.

Why does this happen? Video sources, like Freeview boxes, satellite receivers, DVD players, etc. often default to 4:3 ’squarevision’, even though most TV sets they are likely to be plugged in to are widescreen. Of course this equipment shouldn’t just default to something, it should know automatically how to deal with what it is plugged into, as should the TV set.

Even worse, the video source sometimes outputs 16:9 while the TV set thinks its got 4:3, then you get 16:9 compressed and displayed at 4:3.

We put men on the moon in the 1960’s, yet in the 21st century TV sets and video sources cannot figure out something basic like aspect ratio. We could blame SCART again, but that’s a poor excuse. Roll on HDMI.

One final oddity while I’m on this subject – why do people deliberately stretch a 4:3 picture to fit a widescreen TV set? It looks awful. It’s like they’ve paid for that extra screen space and they’re going to damn well use it.