IF you ever get a widescreen TV you'll have the same problem, only in reverse. Old square program viewed through widescreen TV will necessitate either stretching the pic to the sides in order to fit it the screen (which gives everyone and everything an oval-head Mario Brothers look), OR, pillar-boxing the pic with black bars on the sides to fill in the gaps (or like some programs do and use some kind of blurred overlay in the blank areas to fill the gaps).
Unfortunately, some networks have become bastions of screwing with their programming at the source. They will take a standard def show and morph it to fit their widescreen format, forcing you to jack around with the aspect ratio to get everything back in scale.
Before anyone says it, I know, it's a result of a bunch of dunderhead viewers who insist on having the picture fill the whole screen no matter how grossly morphed it might be. Unfortunately that is a great deal of the viewing public. That's why movies, up until HD and Blu-Ray formats, were always offered in full-screen and widescreen versions, the former marketed to mainstream viewers and the later usually relegated to Special or Extended Collector Edition status. You want a horrible experience? Try watching the LoTR special extended editions in pan&scan. It's bloody awful.
Want an exercise in futility? Try to convince someone their 4:3 fullscreen version of some magnificently restored 2.35:1 CinemaScope treasure is actually only 2/3rds of the movie. The widescreen version can't be right 'cause, dammit!, can't you see those stupid black bars at the top and bottom of the screen??!!
Thankfully Blu-Ray eleminates some of that due to it's 16:9 native aspect ratio. You will still get some letterboxing on the extreme wide-scope films (How The West Was Won comes to mind as the most extreme example) but it's minor enough most of the time folks don't even notice.
Brad
