You get the picture -- and it doesn't always fit

Check out NBC's "The Office" on an older TV set, and boss Michael Scott's larger-than-life personality is apparently too big even for the screen -- half of his face is often cut off when he's talking. Or flip over to TBS-HD's reruns of "Friends" on a widescreen display, and Rachel looks as if she has put on a few pounds and needs another nose job.

With the coming conversion to all-digital TV broadcasts and the influx of high-definition programming, TV shows might look different depending on what kind of set you're using to watch them. Viewers are starting to notice, but they're not laughing.

"If you want to see the picture, you've got to get a widescreen TV," a flustered David Score said.

Like many viewers, the 62-year-old St. Paul resident watches TV on a traditional set, whose screen has an aspect ratio of 4:3. Those dimensions look close enough to square that many people simply refer to it as being that shape. On the other hand, widescreen TVs have a 16:9 display, which is noticeably rectangular.

In the past, when a 16:9 program was viewed on a 4:3 set, the image would be letterboxed -- that is, reduced in size to fit the squarer screen with black space placed above and below the picture.

Lately, though, that isn't always happening, such as when Score watched "Wuthering Heights" recently on Twin Cities Public Television on Channel 2 or when some viewers watch NBC prime-time shows like "The Office." On a 4:3 TV set, only the center portion of those widescreen programs are seen; the sides of the picture are lopped off to fit the screen.

Score, who gets his programming through DirecTV, says he has called programmers to complain. Bruce Jacobs, chief technologist for Twin Cities Public Television, says Score isn't the first viewer to do so.

Ironically, viewers watching on a widescreen TV set often see problems, too. When older 4:3 programs are shown on high-definition channels, such as "Friends" on the high-def version of TBS, the old standard image is sometimes stretched horizontally to fit the wider screen -- making everyone look like eggheads.

Why?

"TBS extends the size of standard programming to fit widescreen in order to provide a consistent viewing experience and avoid constantly shifting aspect ratios," a Turner Broadcasting spokeswoman explained.

Rachel would not be happy to learn that she has so little control over her weight.

"There's no good way to convert one aspect ratio to another. There just isn't," Jacobs said. "We can convert a lower-resolution picture to a higher-resolution picture by just blowing it up. We convert surround sound to stereo just by down-mixing it. A lot of other things we can deal with in a compatible way. But aspect ratio isn't one of them."

Compounding the problem is the fact that viewers can also choose how the image they receive is displayed on their TV by zooming it, cropping it or stretching it. That can lead to bizarre results. Sometimes -- gulp -- the viewer might actually want it that way, because, "Gosh darn it, I paid for a widescreen TV and that picture better darn well fill my screen!"

Throw in changes that broadcasters are making for the digital TV switch on June 12 and the proliferation of widescreen sets, and you get a perfect storm of a not-so-perfect picture.

"When you mix all that up, you get something that's pretty messy," Jacobs said. "For any of us on the engineering side of things, we'd like to think that there would just be some way to fix it, but there isn't. It's very problematic."

The issue is sufficiently complicated enough that Jacobs created a three-page document with 48 images just to explain the various permutations to his non-techie colleagues at TPT.

Hope might be in sight. Jacobs said the broadcasting industry is close to adopting an Active Format Descriptor, once some technical issues are worked out. It will allow broadcasters to include a code with programs that describes the proper aspect ratio of the picture. It will allow providers along the line to present the program properly.

Meanwhile, viewers such as Score will remain frustrated: "Isn't it interesting how technology keeps getting better, better and better, and the programming gets worse, worse, and worse?"