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I think I've found the perfect film for Blu-ray - the one it was absolutely made for. A brilliant film - not really a children's film in any sense as it features death, loneliness, oppression of a senior citizen and attacks by a pack of dogs. The overriding theme is loss. However, for adults who have an open mind, this is a genuinely up lifting experience. There are two reasons why I say this the perfect film for Blu-ray. Firstly, it's the best and most detailed transfer I've ever seen, with an astonishing amount of detail and excellent contrast range. I don't have a full surround sound system, but the soundtrack seems to make full use of the frequency range (my Rel sub-bass speaker was certainly working). Secondly, the aspect ratio is 16:9 or as near to it as makes no difference. This means that the picture fills the whole screen. I'm certainly not one of those people who would stretch a picture to fill the screen, and I'm not averse to having black bars ...

BBC's slipping standards

Comment sent to BBC via their web site this evening: This morning on BREAKFAST there were at least two (I think three) clips in the feature on Morrissey where 4:3 footage was "stretched" to 16:9. I am not a follower of Morrissey, but this picture distortion was immediately obvious to me. For a professional broadcaster, this is simply shoddy. I'm sure your editors and engineers have heard of zooming and cropping - or, of course, they could have used pillarboxing with vertical mattes. The analogy that always comes to my mind is wedding photographs - no-one would consider accepting these if the bride and groom were shown 33% wider than in life, so why does the BBC (that we expect to uphold broadcast standards) do this? This isn't the first time I've seen this on the BBC. I get slightly irritated when I see spelling mistakes in BBC captions too (which seems to get more frequent), but they've probably got more of an excuse for that. The people who put out TV "...