DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Q: How do you make a 42'' television look no bigger than the 20'' television it replaces?
A: Sit twice as far away.

So, we don’t have that huge theater-screen experience we were hoping for, but at least the couch need not sit in the middle of the room like it used to.

The other thing that surprised me about owning a widescreen TV is that some movies are even wider than 16:9. I thought there were only two common aspect ratios for video content — 4:3 (old TVs) and 16:9 (widescreens). 16:9 is roughly 1.77:1… but some movies are shot as wide as 2.35:1. In short, you can buy a widescreen TV, but you can’t fill it.

(Modern televisions have several viewing modes that zoom in on, stretch, and/or squash content to fit the screen. Our plasma even has an innovative mode that only squashes the edges, so that bodies change shape as characters walk offscreen. But I was surprised that a cutting-edge display is essentially already obsolete in this respect.)