I choose to shrink it because it just feels wrong to have the picture cropped or distorted in any way from what was originally intended. But I often get push back by people telling me they don’t notice the difference and that I shouldn’t care.
I think maintaining the original makes the most sense. So, yup, black bars on edges. It looks silly but better than zooming and cropping or doing any sort of stretching.
I suspected that answer “A” would be most popular among graphic designers. But I think we might be in the minority in the rest of the non-graphic designer population of the world.
A. Yup. Black bars. Otherwise I’m getting cheated out of some of the movie I paid for.
Football games should be letterboxed too, for those of us still with standard TVs.
Hey, it ain’t broke yet…
I usually set it to Shrink to Fit. The black space either side doesn’t intrude and I hate it when things are stretched. There is another option called ‘Pan and Scan’ where the picture is cropped at the sides and is moved within the frame whenever something is happening near one of the edges. This is an option on my TV but I don’t use it very often.
I just went to a clinic this morning and noticed a letterbox picture that was stretched, not zoomed. It always bugs me when I go into a public facility and see the wrong aspect ratio. The people who work there never care because they aren’t watching it. Sometimes I look for a remote or buttons in reach to fix the picture.