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Most if not all widescreen LCD's have some options for what to do, in case they get a signal not matching their native aspect ratio.
My widescreen TFT (Philips Brilliance 200W6CS, great display) has three modes for it:
- Don't stretch, meaning any other resolution than the native will be displayed as a small picture in the center of the screen with black bars on all sides.
- Stretch keeping aspect, meaning the image will be stretched, keeping the aspect ratio, eg. 4:3 resolutions will get black bars at the sides.
- Stretch ignoring aspect, meaning resolutions not matching the aspect ratio will be forced to the wrong one anyway, meaning things will look really funny and squished.
Consider if what you *really* want is squished, funny-looking pictures, or you aren't better off with some black bars in the sides. I prefer having black bars to a squished picture, it's not hard getting used to.
But then, many newer games do support widescreen resolutions and will properly adjust the image so things don't look wrong. If you don't know whether a resolution is widescreen, try dividing the width by the height, eg. 1024/768, 1280/1024, 1680/1050, 1280/720. Those yield 1.333..., 1.25, 1.6 and 1.777..., the two last being widescreen, and the way-too-common 1280x1024 resolution actually being almost "tallscreen".
In case you have a regular 4:3 or 5:4 (that's a 1280x1024 LCD) monitor right now, you might try something. Find some widescreen anime, tell your media player to just stretch, ignoring aspect ratio (in MPC that's View->Video Frame->Stretch to Window) and put it on full screen. Notice how everything looks really bad and everyone's way too tall and thin. Stretching 4:3 images to 16:9 or 16:10 (16:10 is the more common widescreen aspect ratio for computer monitors) gives exactly the opposite effect, everyone becomes way too low and fat. Just a nice way of showing why stretching is a bad thing.
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