Whether I rot my brain watching a square screen or a rectangular screen or a sesquicentennihemisemidemihexagonal screen isn't important. What is important, I think, is that the image bear some resemblance to the image the content creator wants us to see. Since flatscreens took over, about half of us seem to be watching compressed images, usually horizontally but also sometimes vertically. On my own set, whenever I get the commercial stations set right, PBS looks wrong. I can't keep going into setup to fix this! I haven't got the strength!
Nor have I got the strength to keep telling people that they're seeing things incorrectly. Perception is subjective so I can't prove it anyway. The whole phenomenon raises troubling questions, I think, about reality. If a representation of reality can't be trusted to be perceived consistently from one person to the next, what about reality itself? No chance.
"Outer Limits" used to threaten to take control of the vertical and the horizontal, but what's actually happened is, nobody's in control of them. Just fix your sets, people!
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