What I was going for in my exaggerated statement was that if you try to play a widescreen movie on a 16:9 TV, then you might end up with it showing a 4:3 image with the TV leaving black bars on the sides, and with the player leaving black bars at the top and bottom

AH! That's a totally different issue! I know what you're saying, and yes it can be an issue.

Here's the problem. There are two different kinds of widescreen movies on DVD:

1) Plain-old letterbox widescreen, which is a 4:3 image where 30 percent of the picture area is wasted on black bars.

2) Widescreen anamorphic (sometimes called "enanced for widescreen TVs" in fine print on the box). This actually uses the full 4:3 frame and has a flag which tells the DVD player to use its widescreen mode. On a 16:9 television, this image is stretched to fill the whole screen and no pixels are wasted on black bars.

If you play version #2 on a widescreen TV or an HDTV, it looks FANTASTIC.

If you play version #1 on a widescreen or HDTV, then the television needs to have a "zoom" mode which allows you to zoom in on the tiny little letterboxed image (to avoid the postage-stamp double-bar syndrome you just described). This is usally a lot more grainy than watching an anamorphic version of the film.

There is one other option, which is that some DVD players (such as certain JVC players) have scaling built into their chipsets which will automatically zoom the letterbox movies for you on your 16:9 television. This is a neat feature and I plan for my next DVD player to include this feature. Supposedly they do a good job at this, better than the Zoom mode on a TV set.

playing a widescreen movie from my VCR probably being one of them -- can I get the TV to stretch that out?

Depends on the TV. On a Mits set, yes. Tends to look a little fuzzy blown up like that.

When you say I'll be underwhelmed by the NTSC in comparison, do you mean in comparison to the HDTV or in comparison to other NTSC monitors?

A little of both, actually. Most HDTV monitors have bigger screens and will enlarge the artifacts on the DirecTV satellite, so that they are bigger than the DirecTV people ever intended them to be viewed at.

Also, most HDTVs have to run NTSC video through a line doubler, which slightly softens an already-soft DirecTV picture. The line doublers usually look pretty good on non-data-compressed pictures, but tend to oversoften pictures that are already data-compressed.

If you do a lot of NTSC watching on an HDTV set, make sure your set has a really good line doubler.