Is Halo 3 multiplayer displayed only in NORMAL?

I heard a rumor (it's a rumor to me because I don't have this game) but heard that during multiplayer mode the picture turns to NORMAL. Not widescreen? What the hell? I can't believe this is true. Not even Sony would do this? But a huge $300+ million game?

I looked this up again and read that it goes to NORMAL display untless you set the display to 480P.
Has anyone experienced this? I guess they can update this via software improvements but it just shocked me.

This is because when you do split screen on a widescreen TV, you get an aspect ratio of 16:4.5, which is totally f***d because of how stretched the picture gets. And splitting the screen vertically gets way too narrow. So they make it 4:3 then split it so the picture isn't horribly distorted and stretched.

Keep in mind, this is only during SPLIT SCREEN multiplayer on a 16:9 TV. (if you have 2 people playing on one Xbox) This won't happen any other time