Can someone explain aspect ratio and wide screen tv's to me?

When I criticized YouTube over the weekend that they were displaying widescreen videos incorrectly and went on with my pet peeve about TV aspect ratios in general confusing consumers, I got a few responses. Though I probably shouldn’t be surprised, a few of them (here and here) actually blasted me because they can’t stand buying a brand new widescreen TV and see black bars on the sides and waste screen Real Estate. User smorty actually said "I let 4:3 stretch to 16:9" and he’s probably very typical.

So I decided to visually explain why this is such a bad idea and maybe then people will understand why their brand new widescreen TV looks so weird. A - 4×3 correctly displayed as 4×3 "full screen" imageExample A shown above is a 4×3 image being displayed correctly on a 4×3 screen. This is the standard 4×3 image format known as "full screen" aspect ratio because it is the typical format used by all the TVs up until recent years.

But what happens if you want to display that same image on a newer widescreen TV that is 16×9 in dimensions? B - 4×3 correctly displayed as 4×3 on a widescreen TVIn example B shown above, we properly maintain the correct aspect ratio by padding the sides with empty black space. The problem with this is that most people would get frustrated with the fact that they just bought big widescreen HDTV and they don’t get to use the full screen.

The truth of the matter is, displaying a standard definition 4×3 ratio image on a newer widescreen TV probably looks better when the image is smaller because the artifacts aren’t as noticeable. But many people would rather fill the entire screen and get quantity over quality. C - 4×3 wrongly displayed in 16×9 "widescreen" formatOption C above is unfortunately one of the more popular choices that people make because it fills the entire screen.

To fill a widescreen with a 4×3 image, we have to stretch the image and completely disregard the aspect ratio. But a lot of people just say "so what, I just want to fill the screen". The problem with this is that you get a distorted image that looks like you’re in a circus funny mirror that makes you look like you’re 33% fatter.

When a person’s head in the image is level, that person will just look fatter and it’s less obvious that something is wrong with the image. But once the head is slightly tilted in our examples, it becomes rapidly apparent that something is really wrong because the head is skewed. Either way, image stretching is the ugliest option available and it drives me up the wall when I see public places showing stretched fat TV like this.

It’s almost bad enough to give me a headache looking at a distorted image.