Playing Older VCR Tapes on Wide Screen HD Televisions


Greg@mnrr

Greg@mnrr

Section Hand
I've been playing VCR tapes of model railroading on a HD, 4K, wide screen televison and the picture seems distorted and very not clear. The same for some DVD's I played on the same television set. I've been playing most of my DVD's on the computer where the video appears sharper.

Am I missing some fine tuning feature to correct this problem?

Thanks.

Greg
 
LOL -- Not my Circus - Not my Monkeys, but I would think that you would have a setting in the TV controls section that would allow you to change from wide to narrow screen.
 
The older programs were formatted for 4x3 screens, the newer televisions are usually 16x9.
You would need to go in to either the player's settings or the television's settings to get the picture to look like it should. When you do this successfully, there should be a grey or black bar on either side of the picture on the screen.
 
Somewhere in your TV's menu system will be a setting for Aspect Ratio, though it might have a different name. As Terry said above, modern TVs default to 16:9. Usually, the only other available setting is 4:3, which is what you need for your old VHS tapes and some DVDs.

You'll have to change to 4:3 to watch your old videos, then change back to 16:9 for normal TV watching. Some TVs can detect the aspect ratio of some video sources and make the switch automatically.

- Jeff
 
I play my VHS tapes with a Toshiba VHS/DVD recorder that has an HDMI output, it automatically upscales the video. Of course it's not perfect, but it looks better than my other VCR with an RCA output and no upscaling.
 
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