Beginning yesterday Monday the 19th I’ve realized that Decades is now zooming in and cropping off the top and bottom of the original aspect ratio of all their programming, similar to what METV and H&I does. Until now I’ve always preferred watching and recording shows off Decades over those channels since they still showed all of them in their original 4:3 aspect ratio with the full picture intact. Now I guess to appease the people who get upset about seeing black bars on the right and left of the screen they’ve cropped it to a 14:9 ratio. I believe going from 4:3 to 14:9 means we’re losing 12.5% of the original picture. Also the picture on Decades looks really bad now, like it’s overly stretched as if the resolution is lower or something, does anyone else see this? This really sucks :(

I don't get the Decades channel,but I can't stand when they do that.Before flatscreens became popular some people complained about channels cropping movies to fit the screen.Now instead they do it with TV shows.It throws the whole picture off.At least when they did it with movies they did not clip the tops and bottoms off the picture.They put effort into still making them very viewable on the small screen via pan and scan(I think that's what it is called).What they are doing with older TV shows is much worse.

It seems that more and more TV channels are doing away with the 4:3 aspect ratio and going with the widescreen garbage with cropped picture and black bars on the screen. Not good at all. I still receive the Antenna TV channel in the normal, full screen picture but I wonder how long that's going to last.

Many of us remember the days when you watched news, and tv and the screen only had the show. No CNN icon, discussion topic or crawl lines. All you saw was the show. I watched a news station recently and 1/3rd of the screen was clutter.

Many of us remember the days when you watched news, and tv and the screen only had the show. No CNN icon, discussion topic or crawl lines. All you saw was the show. I watched a news station recently and 1/3rd of the screen was clutter.

I remember.It was not that long ago either. It was so much better than how they air programs these days.They must think they are clever giving them some type of high tech look when in reality it just looks ridiculous.TV is every way has sunk to an all time low.