| Warping the images? What exactly do you mean? |
The Turner networks (TBS, TNT, etc.) and other Time-Warner channels take the image and stretch it to make it fill a 16x9 type rectangular image completely, no matter how the image was originally created.
As an example, they take a film that is shot in 2.35:1 or similar aspect ratio, and stretch it along the edges, top and bottom, or left and right edges (or both top and bottom and left and right) so it looks you like you are watching an image that is like the type you would see on a funhouse mirror. People look taller than they should, or fatter than they should, depending on where they are in the original image. Objects in the center of the screen look close to normal, but as you move away from the center of the screen the image is warped.
Reported the executives at Turner Broadcasting are quite pleased with the images they get and the results they get from wasting their time stretching things. They feel that customers will complain if they leave black or gray bars along the edges of the screen and preserve the original aspect ratio. That was probably true during the times that many customers went out of their way to get Full Screen DVDs, but there's just no excuse for it now that many customers have TVs that can reproduce the correct aspect ratio with little or no lost space on their TV (they may lose some space along the top and bottom, or sides of the screen for material that wasn't filmed as 16x9, but it's very little relatively speaking).
Turner's version of things is pretty nasty though as if you watch for a while you get a strange motion sickness effect and as you watch you really pick up on the different results and images. I tried to watch Armageddon (Bruce Willis and company) and couldn't figure out why some characters looked downright strange, especially on the outter edges of the image. After reading a bit about how Turner stretches the material they broadcast it made sense, and yes, it was making me nauseous.
