[navjack27]

The whole concept of black bars has always confused me. I know what they are I know what people generally accept the concept of what they are. but they aren't actually what they are. There are no black bars. The content is the size that it is and it's just stretching undistorted to your screen. It's not adding black bars. You're just not using parts of your screen because you shouldn't be using those parts of your screen. Maybe if content like that had a old console TV bezel on the side that had channel dials and the power button and a speaker on one side and half of a bezel and a blurry living room background with a picture of a family on the other that would make people feel more comfortable?

[Brian_K_White]

This. In another comment I tried to equate it with a painting on a wall. A painting never fills the wall. The painting is whatever size and shape it is, and that's that.

Maybe the problem is a tv looks like a frame, and frames are made custom to fit the painting, and so any discrepency looks bad.

But now that tv's are both huge, and are featureless panels with little to no interesting frame let alone actual furniture quality cabinetry, maybe only now they can start to be seen as mini walls where it would actually be kind of pathological to require that every pixel always be lit just because they exist.