I can understand the letterboxing, though.
To keep a 4:3 safe area means the extra benefit of widescreen is basically wasted because nothing of any importance can be put on the sides of the screen. Basically, it's like watching a square screen with just window dressing on the sides. I prefer widescreen to actually mean widescreen, meaning there's stuff going on all throughout the picture. Then again, I've been watching HDTV nearly exclusively since 2010 and entirely exclusively a year later.
Of course, it must be getting really annoying if you're watching an analogue set to have pretty much everything letterboxed these days, except for (maybe) local news and a small handful of other programs. Back in the day I spent a lot of effort looking for widescreen movies on VHS instead of pan-and-scan simply because I didn't want to miss what was going on in the rest of the picture in the original version. Yes, the resolution suffered - VHS had less resolution than broadcast television, and letterbox made the picture even smaller, but, the videophile I am, I thought it was worth it just to see the entire picture. Of course, I probably would have started to go insane seeing everything in letterbox on nearly every channel. So much wasted space.
That said, widescreen and HDTV are certainly the present of television broadcasting, and maintaining compatibility with old technology can only go on for so long. Digital adapters for antennas and analogue-compatible cable boxes and satellite receivers still allow analogue sets to continue living instead of having to die before their time, and TV sets aren't so cheap that they can be readily discarded on a whim. (I just got lucky in 2010 when my 17-year-old set finally bit the bullet. And 17 years is pretty darn good for a TV set! If it hadn't have died I'd probably still be using it, but I took the fortuitous timing to ugrade to HDTV, especially it had since become impossible to buy an analogue CRT set.)
Then again, maybe there's still an option other than forced letterboxing. Most digital adapters I know of (and I sell them for a living) allow you to choose between 4:3 and 16:9, regardless of the original aspect of the program, so you can choose to have empty space at the top and bottom of the screen, or you can fill the screen and simply miss what's taking place on the sides. (I even saw one that will compress the width of 16:9 to fill a 4:3 screen in both directions, but that just looks odd.) Cable boxes differ widely, but, out of curiosity, I decided to see what options were available on mine for analogue sets. Before a year and a half ago it was possible to choose between 4:3 and 16:9 on the analogue channels, but now that my cable company has gone all-digital that option appears to have disappeared. (I have no means of testing it one way or the other, however.)
As I said, I can understand not wanting to get rid of a TV set that's still in perfect working order, even if it is considered "obsolete" by today's standards. But the price of HDTV sets is dropping. The cheapest 20" set that I sell is already $119.99. I'm not saying it's the greatest model in the world, but it's a sign of how prices are slowly but steadily going down. I bought a 40" set a couple of years ago for just over $200 online, and that was considered a steal at the time. I didn't need it at the time, since I already had a 32" in the living room and 20" in the bedroom, but it was such a steal that I couldn't let it pass me by. It's possible now - just a couple of years later - to get the same size on sale for nearly the same amount that I paid.
