Time Warner Cable provides a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD box with their hi-def package. It’s annoyed me for weeks that standard-def channels have neutral grey bars on the sides of the display with no way to change them to another color, like, say, black.

I came across a rather inelegant solution, but it works and it beats looking at the annoying grey bars.

1) Tell the cable box to stretch the 4:3 image to 16:9 (press the # key to select “Stretch picture” setting).

2) Tell your TV to display the image in 4:3 (thus de-stretching the image). This will squish the image back to 4:3 but this time with black bars. Some sets do this differently than others so check your manual if you have to. Lucky for me this setting sticks for 4:3 stretched, but does not attempt to squish legit 16:9 content so I don’t have to switch back and forth as I change between SD and HD.

I doesn’t seem visibly effect the picture, but at 46″, SD looks horrible pretty much no matter what.

I understand why Time Warner gimped the box by disabling the ability to set the color of the bars (other cable providers allow this functionality on the same box). The phosphors in plasma displays could retain the black side bars thus discoloring the display. The color neutral grey consists of equal bars of red, green, and blue at 50% brightness thus all phosphors get equal work out. At least that’s my theory, and it sounds better than, Time Warner are simply idiots. Sucks for those of us with LCDs who need not worry about burn in and image retention.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.