Playstation 2 and 16:9 mode - am I insane?

[BillLeeLee]

Hey guys,

So I got a working PS2 again (that will play US games) and I was testing out Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria and FF XII on it. I wanted to play them in 16:9 wide screen, so I set the right options in the game to do so. However, if I press the 'display' button on the TV remote, the status still says it's only getting a 4:3 signal.

I have a Sony KDF-E42A10 42 inch 720p TV. So now I'm left wondering if setting my TV to 'Full' mode is correct. I have 4 options - Full, Wide Zoom, Normal, and Zoom.

Full - if you have a 16:9, displays it 1:1, but if the image is 4:3, stretches it horizontally to fill the screen.

Normal - displays a 4:3 as a 4:3 with huge black bars on the side.

Wide Zoom - proportionally stretches a 4:3 to reduce distortion.

Zoom - just zooms in on a 4:3 to fill up the screen. Cuts off everything at the border basically.

Full mode seems to look fine. I did a test and set the game back to 4:3, leaving the TV in full mode, and everything looked stretched and people looked liked squashed midgets. If set it to 'Normal' the characters look like they do in 'Full' mode.

Are you supposed to manually set your TV to 'full' mode when widescreen is enabled on the PS2? From quick research, I read that the PS2 doesn't correctly set the 16:9 flag so the TV will always say it's a 4:3 source.

Thanks for any help!