The Shape of Things

-The shape of the screens was a puzzle at first. The traditional TV screen turns out to be not quite square, but rather a 4:3 ratio, meaning the picture is slightly wider than it is high. The sales people call this the 4:3 "aspect ratio," a word designed to generate terror in the average consumer. The new HDTV sets I looked at came in this shape as well — but also in a W-I-D-E screen version, called a 16:9 aspect ratio. What to do??? Some of the sites I checked out on this issue wanted to know if I would be watching lots of movies or mostly regular shows. Hell, I don't know...I want to be able to watch everything. And at these prices, I want it all to look pretty damned good! Some shows, I was warned, might not fill out the wider screen, leaving nasty black bars at both ends of the picture. But the traditional screen would not show me all the action in a wide-screen movie, cutting off both ends of the scene. Hmmm.