It's no big deal to press a button.

Unless you're my wife....

Seriously, though, now that I think about it, autodetecting that the valid NTSC that's squished is different from other valid NTSC is pretty amazing. I can deal with the button push. My wife can't figure out how to use the DVD player anyway.

One thing I forgot to mention is that when the Sony I looked at was showing the non-anamorphic widescreen picture, it looked like the line doubler was having a problem detecting the edge between the picture and blackness, leaving a weird artifact where there was the field of blackness, then a line of picture, then a line of less bright picture, then normal through the picture field, and then the inverse at the bottom. I guess there's some sort of interpolation going on. It went away, as I expected, when I switched the DVD player to anamorphic mode. But it still concerns me, because even anamorphic DVDs will have such an edge when showing something filmed in an aspect ratio greater than 16:9 (Ben Hur comes to mind again). Does anyone else see similar artifacts on their HDTV?