Home audio & video forum: Seeking DVD player with good panoramic zoom, gradual zoom

me too. i'd like to find a portable with zoom for all those old letterboxed widescreen dvd's in order to use the full display resolution. the sony fx - 970 has a zoom but it distorts the picture. i've got a small, lo-res sylvania player with zoom, but it stretches 4:3 to fill the screen whether you want it to or not.
i'm amazed that with all the older letterboxed dvd's out there there don't seem to be any players with a zoom to utilize the whole screen.

no; black bars are the obvious result of placing a 4:3 picture on a 16:9 screen. "letterboxing" presents a picture of 16:9 (or 2.35:1) on a 4:3 screen - with black bands top and bottom. Such letterboxed dvd's shown on a wide screen gives black top, bottom, sides; the picture is a small patch in the middle, wasting a lot of resolution. zooming the picture to use the entire screen (or more of it for 2.35:1) would make best use of available screen pixels; especially beneficial with a portable. sony's zoom distorts the picture; sylvania has a zoom, but stretches 4:3 to fill screen making it useless for de-letterboxing. orei is the same plus the TWO zoom icons stay obtrusively on the screen.

the above mentioned portable dvd players all have a "zoom" ; they are defective / unusable for de-letterboxing in one way or another.
to use the zenith zoom i have to put the 4:3 in a 16:9 container with software, put the result on a dvd then zoom the letterbox out to fill the screen. works well, but you shouldn't have to do all that.
hopefully sony will fix their zoom on the next model; with 800 x 480 pixels it would look as good as widescreen on their players.

I wonder if a dvd player with upconversion would do that. Is auto zoom we are more interested in or is the aspect ratio we are more interested in?

I hear you but it appears there are no players that do this anymore. My bet is a patent that costs too much. Your average consumer is unaware of how a patent can mean some nice feature can't be in the products.

I have a small HTPC that can do what you ask.
Bob

what's an "htpc" hardware ? software?

if i can't find a philips at a superstore to try, i'll probably order one from amazon, fingers crossed, & if the zoom doesn't work return it as i did with the orei 901; amazon has a very liberal return policy.