am No. Remember the red-velvet curtains in movie theaters?

They used to move in/out and down to frame the image. This was because movies are not standardized in their screen sizes. You have always had ‘black bars’ in a movie theater, but you likely never noticed. The standard for a high def TV show is 16:9 and most HDTV’s exactly match this. But a movie will try to display exactly as shown in the theaters so there will be bars on a HDTV. Many televisions have an “aspect” button on the remote which will expand the video to fill the screen. This does cause some distortion, but you are free to use it if you want. Just examine the remote on any HDTV you are considering and make sure it has this button if it’s important to you. Some televisions do not have a button, but let you do this with a setup menu which is less easy.  more