Right now on DTT, TV2 are playing the film Femme Fatal which is a 4:3 master.
Normally this would be a perfectly sufferable fact of life, but those boffins at TVNZ have found a way to make it a whole lot worse. They've decided to zoom it out to 16:9!

The first ad break finished and I was presented with short fat people (oops, the chimp in the control room was too busy peeling his banana and missed the big red flashing button!)
Before my eyes, I saw the aspect ratio undergo a manual adjustment and the screen stretched vertically to put everyone back into shape (and take half the vertical picture with it).

Most of the time this would mostly go unnoticed, but this particular film has some subtitles, which of course got dramatically cropped. So then I witnessed yet another aspect ratio change, this time zoomed in a fraction to give slight pillar boxing around on the left and right sides and so the subs would be less...missing?

As this pic will illustration (keep inmind that this is the entire raster and not what most people with overscanning will be able to see without further crop).

http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y64/faranheit/TV2Crop.jpg


Now I can appreciate that there is a whole lot of old 4:3 material still out there (and some new), but this is not the way to deal with it. If you have to use 4:3 material, play it as is.
If I want to zoom it out, I'll do it my-damn-self.
Muppets.


P.S. Fortunately its not an unmissable film, but thats even more reason for them not to try and attempt to polish a turd.