Posted Fri Apr 27, 2012 12:06 PM
I signed up for Prime because of this. I'm impressed with the picture quality, but am annoyed that it's letter boxing everything. I watched the first Mythbusters and there black bars at the top/bottom and Adam and Jamie looked fat. I also watched Farscape and likewise Crichton and gang were fat with black bars on all 4 sides of the image. It's even letter boxing the menu screens.
I contacted them a couple weeks ago and they said "make sure your PS3 has 720p turned on", despite the fact that I told them in my original message that 720p was not an option*. So I reiterated that 720p wasn't an option and they replied back that they'd forward it to their video team. Haven't heard anything since then. They did release an update to the player, but that was the day after I sent the initial inquiry and it didn't fix the problem I'm having.
I suspect what's happening is Amazon wrote the player with the assumption that 720p = 16:9 display and 480p = 4:3 display.
* my TV died in 2001, so I bought an HDTV early on. My HDTV predates HDMI by a couple years, so it's connected to HD sources via component video. It also only supports 480i, 480p and 1080i, displaying a blue screen with out-of-sync message if it receives a 720p signal.