On an HD television, there are black bars on all four sides. Other stations broadcast the SD signal in a way that the left and right sides of the image are cut off.
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Our local Fox station broadcasts in 720p, but Dish gives us the SD version with the left/right sides cut off. Usually not a problem except when you are watching a baseball or football game and you can only read half the score.
Check to make sure your zoom settings are what you expect. Shortly before I swapped to Dish America, I was zooming ESPN in SD so that it fit my HDTV exactly. Low res, but much more enjoyable when it filled the entire screen. I wish every SD feed was letterboxed that way when they have wide-format content. As you say, cutting the edges is much less enjoyable than zooming in.
Use stretch instead of zoom. Let the station squeeze the horizontal, leaving the vertical alone. Then you can (on your HD set) stretch the horizontal back to a normal picture--not as sharp but with 4/3rds more pixels than having letterbox and zooming it. I had this for a little while with Eastern NM PBS station that only had SD but were the only on still carrying NBR. Fortunately in the last 10 days Dish now sends it out as HD but no SD. This is great and they gave us the two ABQ satellite PBS station even if some of the second is partially window-boxed--not Dish's fault. I'm replacing PBS OTA with PBS satellite to use only 1/3 the disk space on the keepers.
-Ken
As long as the old 4:3 SD tvs work with the cable box and Dish and Direct's receivers, there will be old tvs around for as long as they still work. More people get tv through cable than OTA.
As long as the old 4:3 SD tvs work with the cable box and Dish and Direct's receivers, there will be old tvs around for as long as they still work. More people get tv through cable than OTA.